Everyone seemed to enjoy my destruction of an NEX camera a couple of weeks ago. I made the statement in that post that it was amazing how simple and clean the camera was compared to even a small SLR. So, of course, a number of people then wanted me to open up an SLR so they could see the difference. Having matured only marginally since 3rd grade, I had no choice except to rise to the challenge once someone said “bet you won’t take an SLR apart like that”.
So, yesterday a D7000 got a nasty scratch on the sensor. It was already an older camera and Nikon has upped prices on sensor replacements to the point it wasn’t economically worthwhile to replace it. So it was time to go get some useful parts. Why? Because with the Nikon parts shortage we can sell the parts for more than the camera. (Anybody besides me seeing the coincidence of “Nikon will no longer sell parts to independent repair shops” and Nikon repair prices going up? Just me? OK, well I’ll up my medication again.)
With the recent camera releases (or maybe Spring fever) I’ve been rather amazed watching various photography forums have major melt downs during the last few weeks. I said something about cameras and lenses just being tools, not life and death, and got immediately annihilated. They aren’t just tools, I was told, they are the means to make a living for some people, and the passionate hobby of others. That got me thinking, though: I have friends who make their living as carpenters, and others for whom woodworking is a passionate hobby. I got to thinking how silly their forums would seem if they acted like we do:
The D800 accepts any F-mount lens, and for any decent lens, you’ll get better resolution with the D800 than you could with a lesser camera. So answer #1 to the question “What lens can I use?” is any lens you please and it will resolve better on the D800 than on your previous camera.
The D800′s ultra-high resolution sensor can provide amazing detail. Not every lens (in fact, not most lenses) are going to be able to give you the maximum resolution the camera is capable of. This list isn’t about great lenses, it’s about what lenses can wring the most resolution out of a D800 when you need every ounce of resolution. Maybe you have a two page magazine spread to shoot, or more likely you just want to post your pics on a Canon forum to rile everyone up.
Even with a great lens, you’ll almost certainly need to shoot that lens with the aperture closed down one or two stops from maximum aperture. Most do better with 2 stops. But diffraction softening is clearly present at f/8 so do not stop down past f/8. But again, that’s for people who want to wring every bit of resolution out of the camera. Very few will need to do that most of the time.
We’re testing lenses on D800s as fast as we can, we’ve got literally dozens of “please test this lens requests”. Now that we have more cameras and more time, we’ve been able to be more thorough. Every lens with resolution numbers below has been tested with more than on copy on more than one camera. If we’ve tested it, it’s on this page. Also on this page are some that we haven’t tested, but that we are comfortable will work well and deliver high resolution images.
I’ve taken down the recommended / not recommended remarks by the various lenses: to be honest I’m pretty sick of people who don’t read the disclaimers and then go waste an hour of time talking about what a great lens I haven’t recommended. So we’ll be more subtle: if I haven’t linked to our web page for the lens in question, I’d really rather you don’t rent that lens for use on the D800. You’ll probably end up unhappy.
Finally, for those who want to know how the 18-55 kit lens, Quantary 70-300, etc. will perform I’m just going to leave my remarks at “Really???”. Check out the Nikon 28-300 or 24-120 lenses below. Those two are really quite good lenses, far better than kit lenses, almost all third party lenses, etc. and they can’t approach maximum resolution with the D800.
This page was last updated May 4th. Today’s editions are the two wide-angle lenses most requested: the Zeiss 21mm and the Nikon 24mm PC-E. The Zeiss lived up to it’s reputation of being nearly as sharp wide open as stopped down, one of the only lenses that has done that on the D800. The PC-E didn’t do as well. Everyone wished it had, it would be a great wide solution, but I can’t say I’m surprised. We’ve never found it quite as sharp as the 45mm and 85mm versions. This will also be the last update, at least for quite a while. I’ve got other things I have to put ahead of this for now.
I also was able to grab a D800E long enough to test it at one focal length: since 100mm was set up, I tested the Zeiss 100 Makro planar.
There was, if anything, a bigger difference than I thought. On the D800 the lens had a maximum center / average resolution of 1091 / 1030. On the 800E it was 1250 / 1120. Now let me state I have no idea how much the AA filter is expected to effect MTF 50 resolution, but the difference surprised me. Let me emphasize this was one quick test with a couple of copies of the lens on one D800E body. Let’s wait until professional reviewers have more time with the D800E to see if there is that big a difference in real-world photography, and with other lenses.
It’s been kind of an exciting couple of weeks, with 3 major new SLRs released and a couple of more on the way. There are plenty of people out there who are doing in-depth reviews, touting the greatness of the new cameras, and trashing them online without having touched one (My favorite so far is the guy who, after looking at online jpgs, stated it was obvious that the 5D Mk III and D800 weren’t a bit better than his T2i, so he wouldn’t be upgrading). I don’t have much to say regarding image noise, ergonomics, autofocus accuracy, image processing, etc. There are plenty of people doing that more thoroughly and accurately than I could.
But there was one question that was really eating my lunch and I was in a position to take a look at it: just how much better would the Nikon D800, with that gazillion megapixels, really resolve? Would it be 3 times better than a D700, and 50% better than a Canon 5D Mk III, which the pixel count would suggest? Would the lenses we have really be able to take advantage of that resolution? I wasn’t sure.
So when we got a bunch of Canon 5D Mk III’s and a few Nikon D800s in last week and I was able to divert a few over to our Imatest lab for a few hours. There wasn’t enough time to do exhaustive testing (generally the cameras arrived at 10 a.m. and had to be in packing to ship out by 3 p.m.) but I was able to get enough done to make some preliminary observations.
I’ve always been fascinated by pancake lenses. It just amazes me that something that small can actually function. As I mentioned in an earlier post, we’ve been taking things apart to determine where and how (and sometimes if) the lenses can be adjusted optically. So, I decided to do two pancake lenses for mirrorless cameras side-by-side to see how they differed (the Sony 16mm f/2.8 E mount and the Olympus 17mm f/2.8 micro 4/3 mount). I wasn’t sure there would be much we could do with pancakes (and there wasn’t), but I still found the look inside rather interesting.
Today's contestants: the lovely and talented Sony 16mm f/2.8 and Olympus 17mm f/2.8 pancake lenses.
Since everyone seemed to enjoy looking inside an NEX mirrorless camera, I decided to take more pictures while doing today’s disassembly.
The vast majority of my blog posts are about things other than Lensrentals, but a couple of times a year I put out an update about the things we’re doing in-house. Those who like a ‘behind the scenes’ look usually enjoy finding out, well, what we’re doing behind the scenes. This year, since most of our Winter efforts focused on testing and quality assurance, we’ve also learned some interesting things.
Lensrentals has roughly doubled in size every year for the last 5 years. That sort of growth means it’s not “Roger in command 24/7″ anymore. We’ve added people who do various things better than I do, and who have time to do those things. That has allowed me to go do the things that I really enjoy doing the most (playing with gear) and that I think are the most important (quality assurance).
Quality assurance is something that we’ve always prided ourselves on and I’ve always felt comfortable saying “no one takes better care of their equipment than Lensrentals”. But, being human, we didn’t do it perfectly, and if we aren’t perfect then there’s room for improvement. I’m comfortable that in 2012 we will deliver a level of equipment excellence that we’ve never attained before (and that no one else is close to).
With so many highly anticipated items coming out over the next few weeks and (hopefully not) months, we are getting a lot of questions about release dates. For those of you wondering, here is the deal:
As soon as an item is announced and we know we are going to carry it, we’ll add it to the website.
Until we get a firm confirmation on when we expect to have the item in stock, it will show as “Out of Stock” on our website.
Even though an item says “Out of Stock” you can still reserve it for a future date.
If we still don’t have the item in stock 2 to 3 days in advance of your reservation date, we’ll let you know.
We’ve listed all of the anticipated new items here in this post. For now, if we don’t have a confirmed release date, we’ve put in our best guess as to when we think we will have it in stock. We’ve also included links to any new accessories being released for these products. Once we get a confirmed date that we will have the equipment in our hands, we’ll update this post, and the item’s expected arrival date on our website. Again, you can reserve all of these items now, we just can’t guarantee that we will be able to fill the order until we get a confirmed release date. Continue reading →
I have to say I have one of the better jobs on the planet, at least for a photography gear-head. The part I like best — well, really there’s a lot of parts I like best — but one fun part is that my job description includes: Take things apart. See how they work. Learn how to fix them.
Sometimes taking things apart is disappointing. I just don’t want to know things like “so you hold that together with a piece of Scotch tape, huh?” Some cameras and lenses look really nice on the outside, but inside there’s so much chaos I wonder if someone in the corporation is saying “We have 2 million of these parts left over, put them in something so we don’t have to write them off.”
Inside view of Canon autofocus system, greatly magnified.
Every so often, though, I get to see an internal design that is so elegant and efficient I think the engineers should have signed it like a painting. The Sony NEX cameras are that way. Perhaps being so small required efficient engineering, or maybe the team that designed it just was so good. Maybe the fact that there was no legacy technology that was cheap to carry over to the next model let the engineers, rather than the beancounters, make all the decisions. Whatever the reason, the layout is amazing.
I got to take apart an NEX 3 the other day (water in a camera is a bad thing) and thought some of you might like seeing the insides so I took a few pictures along the way.
In the past couple of months, tons of new items have been announced and released. On top of that, we’ve really stepped up our game as far as expanding our product lines. Combine the two, and we’ve added more new items in the past few months than at any time in our history. We’ve created this handy guide to our favorite new items that have been added to our lineup in the past few months.
This list only includes items that have actually been released, so items like the Nikon D4 or Canon 1D X aren’t listed.
Many of you know there’s nothing I enjoy more than doing meaningless tests just out of curiosity. I tend to not publish most of them because I figure nobody but me is really interested, but I’ll throw this one out there. We got our first batch of Canon G1X cameras in. I’ll be blunt: I don’t particularly like them. I want the option of a viewfinder (the door of most hotel rooms have better viewfinders than the thing they put in this camera) and I’m not happy with a standard range lens that’s f/5.6 for most of its range.
But I have to admit the images I’ve seen with the G1X seem to have really high resolution. So I thought I’d do a comparison and run some G1X cameras through Imatest to see just what the MTF50 turned out to look like. Since I consider the G1X to be mostly a G12 (point-and-shoot) replacement I decided to do some G12 cameras too, just to see the difference. And since I had some 7D cameras with 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lenses handy I thought we’d just see how the G1X stacked up against them.
