Zoom lenses for stills photography first appeared in the early 1960s, but they were bulky, very expensive and optically inferior to the era’s fixed focal length lens technology. It would take another three decades or so of steady refinement before zooms could really start to compete with standard optics on price and performance. And by the mid-1990s, zooms were pretty much every new photographer’s first lens.
Now, antique that I am,
