Cooke launches AP3 FF anamorphic primes for full-frame mirrorless rigs

Cooke took a clear swing at where premium optics are headed next: full-frame mirrorless. The AP3 FF series arrives as three 1.5x anamorphic primes, a 35mm T2.4, 50mm T2.4 and 85mm T2.4, all built as a ground-up mirrorless design rather than a cinema lens adapted down for smaller bodies.

That matters because Cooke is not selling this as a novelty or a halo exercise. The company framed AP3 as a way to make high-end anamorphic imaging more accessible to owner-operators and cinematographers who want the texture of anamorphic without moving into a full PL ecosystem. For small production teams and advanced hybrid creators, that is the real story: Cooke is acknowledging that serious motion work now lives on stills bodies as often as it does on traditional cinema rigs.

The practical details back that up. The lenses ship in Sony E mount, with RF, L and M mounts available as free accessories, and Cooke says users can order a second mount free of charge within six months of purchase. Each lens keeps the same 87mm front diameter, measures roughly 142 to 159mm long, and weighs between 1177g and 1410g. That kind of uniformity is not glamorous, but it is exactly what matters when you are swapping lenses fast, running matte boxes, or trying to keep a gimbal balance from turning into a half-hour rebuild.

Cooke also gave the AP3 set proper cinema ergonomics: 0.8 MOD gears, 79 degrees of iris-ring rotation and 160 degrees of focus-ring rotation. The close-focus figures are practical too, 0.5m on the 35mm, 0.6m on the 50mm and 0.9m on the 85mm. The aperture range runs from T2.4 to T16, and Cooke says the optical design balances controlled anamorphic character with the clarity and dependability modern filmmaking demands, while keeping focus breathing low.

That combination tells you where the market is going. Cooke has spent more than a decade building its anamorphic line, starting with the Anamorphic/i S35 in 2013 and the Anamorphic/i FF in 2018, and it followed that with the SP3 mirrorless prime series in 2023. AP3 looks like the next step in that strategy, not a detour. For a brand that traces its history to H. Dennis Taylor’s 1893 Cooke Triplet and the familiar Cooke Look, the move says something bigger than a product launch: mirrorless is no longer the compromise option. It is where high-end anamorphic investment is landing.