>>3886795>Why can't manufacturers into small lenses anymore?A few different reasons. One of them is, as
>>3886800 alluded to, the fact that more complicated optical formulae are needed to get the higher levels of quality that most people expect from lenses these days.
Another related reason is the nature of digital sensors--with film, the film grains don't actually give a shit what angle the light hits them. With digital, it works a lot better if the angle is closer to perpendicular to the focal plane. This necessitates a more telecentric design so the light doesn't come out of the lens at very oblique angles at the edges.
But the big reason is autofocus. All major brands now make their lenses with autofocus motors inside the lens body, as well as all of the control electronics needed to support those autofocus motors. So even modern pancake lenses with pretty small optics still need to be thicker around to hold the motors to drive autofocus. This is why even modern pancake lenses, which are about as short as possible, are still bigger around than classic manual focus lenses.
(Plus, there's been a trend towards larger lens mounts, especially recently, because of the angle of light issue I mentioned earlier. So even if a lens *could* be made smaller, it would look weird to have a tiny lens with a big base to connect to the mount. So there's an aesthetic aspect)
If you look at some of the manual focus lenses coming out of the smaller third-party brands, like 7Artisans stuff, you'll find that a lot of it is still really small. Not as small as that Minolta 40mm, maybe, which was deliberately going for small as a primary design goal, but easily as small as the average classic rangefinder lens.
