Just the MTF Charts: 70-200mm f/4 Zoom Lenses

63 Comments

1. J.L. Williams · July 22, 2019

   Re center vs. edge sharpness, I remember reading this years ago: “Lenses could be sharper, smaller, simpler and cheaper if they were designed to form an image on a curved surface, and making a curved digital sensor wouldn’t be difficult. The only reason it hasn’t happened is because nobody wants to go first.” Still true, you think?

   1. asad137 · July 22, 2019

      making a curved digital sensor wouldn't be difficult.

      Maybe not "difficult" in absolute terms, but certainly significantly more difficult than making a flat sensor. The overwhelmingly vast majority of semiconductor fab processes out there in the world are based on processing flat wafers; to make a curved sensor, you either need to:

      a) start with a curved substrate, for which you'd have to design completely new processes, possibly new machines, etc, or

      b) build a curved surface up on a flat substrate and then figure out how to make a sensor on it, which leads you to many of the same problems as (a), or

      c) use a curved microlens array on top of a flat sensor (which comes with its own engineering challenges but is probably easier than making an actual curved sensor)

      Even if you can create a curved sensor, even that isn't a panacea, because the ideal curvature for one lens isn't going to be the same as for another, which is obviously a problem for interchangeable lens cameras -- you can get the benefit of the curved sensor for one lens, but it might be worse than a flat sensor for others:
      https://fstoppers.com/gear/...

   2. Roger Cicala · July 22, 2019

      The theory is true, although not just a simple curved flat sensor, like those curved TVs and computer displays; it would have to be curved in both dimensions. That wouldn’t make lenses aberration free, although it would simplify some things. But all lenses (and the software to design them, I think) would have to be totally redone. I doubt any interchangeable lens camera manufacturer sees that as a great idea. It might be we see it on some fixed lens or (more likely I think) cell phone cameras.

      But this is rather out of my area of expertise. Brandon might be able to give better comments but I think he’s pretty swamped right now.

      1. Andreas Werle · July 23, 2019

         Of course, a curved sensor is no solution for interchangeable lens cameras. But a “adaptive sensor” would be. Imagine a sensor which does not consist of one piece of flat silicon, but of thousands tiny pieces, each one sitting on a small actuator which can move it backward and forward and also tilt the surface. It would result in a sensor surface which can be adapted to every form needed and so compensate some lens errors.

         1. geekyrocketguy · July 23, 2019

            Curved sensors can work with interchangeable lens cameras. An adaptable curvature sensor would be great (it doesn’t need to be actuated, silicon is stretchy and can just be pulled into the necessary shape!), but this isn’t necessary. If a sensor with fixed curvature is used, all lenses could be designed for that standard curved shape. The necessary field corrections (and therefore associated aberrations) would still be reduced compared to those for a flat sensor.

            1. asad137 · July 26, 2019

               silicon is stretchy and can just be pulled into the necessary shape

               Uh, not it isn’t. Silicon is a rigid crystalline material and is not stretchy at all. Are you confusing “silicon” with “silicone”?

               1. geekyrocketguy · July 27, 2019

                  Before you try flaming me, you should do a /little/ research. What I said is correct. Go read some papers. I found this one in ~1 minute of searching, and there are dozens more where this came from. Multiple research groups are working on this same strategy: take an originally flat sensor, and then bend it into the curved shape. If the SILICON is thin enough, it can absolutely be pulled into the necessary shape.

                  https://www [dot] spiedigitallibrary [dot] org/conference-proceedings-of-spie/10709/2312654/Curved-detectors-developments-and-characterization-application-to-astronomical-instruments/10.1117/12.2312654.full?SSO=1

                  1. asad137 · July 27, 2019

                     Nearly every material is ‘stretchy ‘if you make it thin enough. Making a blanket statement like “silicon is stretchy” without any qualifiers is, at best, misleading.

      2. Søren Stærke · July 24, 2019

         The reason there is so many elements in modern lenses is among other things to correct for Petzval curvature or Spherical aberations. This means that using a curved sensor would reduce the amount of “correction” needed, BUT the ideal amount of curvature is entirely dependent on focal length of the lens. Wide angles gives best results with very curved focal planes (read: sensors) whilst telephoto lenses yield a rather flat focal plane.
         So to change to a curved sensor you not only need to determine which focal length do you want to optimize for, but you also have to ditch your entire current lens ecosystem, and you also need to change your entire sensor production facility because spherical silicon wafers are not something anyone works with.

         Basically there is a few advantages with curved sensors but so many disadvantages that it’s not reasonable to do.

         Btw, yes it is easy to simulate in optics software like Zemax. I’ve done it before.

         1. Misha Engel · July 28, 2019

            The solution to the problem of spherical aberration (established by Wasserman-Wolf in 1949) has been solved by: Rafael Guillermo González Acuña

            Rafael Guillermo González Acuña studied Industrial Physics Engineering at Tecnológico de Monterrey and completed the Master’s Degree in Optomechatronics at the Optics Research Center, A.C. He is currently studying the Doctorate in Nanotechnology at the Tecnológico de Monterrey. His doctoral thesis focuses on the design of free spherical aberration lenses.

            1. Brandon Dube · August 7, 2019

               Spherical aberration was introduced by Descartes in Dioptrique.

   3. Ilya Zakharevich · July 22, 2019

      @JLW:

      I would believe this statement only if the author would come with a convincing quantification. There are two serious issues; I doubt the author took them into account:

      • First, look, for example, at Sigma 35mm F1.2 DG DN Art. It has 17 elements in 11 groups. This is 17+11=28 positions-and-shapes of optical surfaces to tune up (for the purpose of increasing image quality). The more tune up parameters, the better is the best image quality one can obtain.

      Now add a curved sensor to this mix. This is an extra surface which you may involve in the optimization process. So instead of 28, you get 29. (In fact, you cannot change the position of the sensor, so it is more similar to adding ½ of extra parameter!) This does allow more improvement?—?but is 28½ vs 28 a big enough change to deserve the trouble?! (Increasing instead the number of surfaces in the lens by 2% would increase price by what?—?$30?)

      • Second, every lens would require a particular shape of the sensor. Forget about it for interchangeable lens cameras!

      1. Brandon Dube · July 25, 2019

         Surfaces are not equal for different purposes. If you want to image on a flat surface, you absolutely must have both positive and negative powered elements for the Petzval sum to be anywhere near zero. If you curve the image, you don’t need negative lenses anymore because the image plane can curve as the positive lenses want it to. This means you can delete the negative lenses, which probably injected aberrations into your design anyway.

         Or, in the more general case, it gives you a knob that is essentially a 1:1 control over field curvature. Where you may have had 5, maybe 10 elements all fighting each other to get near zero field curvature otherwise.

         This makes the curved image surface as valuable as several other elements, not just parameters, in the design.

   4. geekyrocketguy · July 23, 2019

      There is active research occurring on curved sensors for a variety of applications. When I go to conferences and see these presentations, I try to talk to the people afterwards about when it might be seen in a commercial product and what form it would take.

      Curved focal planes are currently used in astronomy, though in most cases these are a bunch of flat sensors mosaiced together into a curved shape. This reduces/eliminates the need for a field flattener. I would post links to examples, but whenever I do that, my comment gets flagged as spam. Google “panstarrs focal plane” for one example. I think there are examples of monolithic curved sensors, but these are weird one-offs.

      I talked to a group that was taking full-frame CMOS sensors (Sony? I forget the manufacturer. There were your standard DSLR sensors though) and curving them. Dark current, read noise, etc are mostly unaffected. They then tested these with various DSLR lenses (modified to removed the field flattening elements) and had good results. I asked if zoom lenses can be made compatible with curved sensors, and the answer was yes.

      Canon and Nikon have tons of patents for curved sensors. They are clearly researching these. I won’t post a link, or else this comment will never see the light of day (Roger, can I maybe be put on a whitelist or something?), but a search of CanonRumors will turn up some of these.

      Before the latest lines of mirrorless cameras came out, I really was hoping that Canon or Nikon would incorporate curved sensors into them. A curved sensor would greatly simplify (and therefore lighten and cheapen) lenses, and it would improve corner sharpness and vignetting. However, since Canon and Nikon have recently released their mirrorless systems and committed to flat sensors for the next couple decades, I suspect that we won’t see curved sensors in interchangeable cameras in the near future. They may turn up in some compact cameras or cell phones, though.

      Edit: I don’t know this for a fact, but given that curved sensors are used in astronomy, I believe that your standard optical design software like Code V or ZeMax can accommodate curved focal planes.

      1. Roger Cicala · July 23, 2019

         I would white list you if I could. I think if you post your links it usually puts it in purgatory until someone releases it, I do have that power.

         1. Misha Engel · July 26, 2019

            This https://petapixel.com/2019/07/05/goodbye-aberration-physicist-solves-2000-year-old-optical-problem/ will change everything.

      2. Brandon Dube · July 25, 2019

         Any optical design program can accommodate a curved focal plane – just alter the curvature of the image surface. You can make it a more complex surface (a sphere, Freeform, […]), too.

      3. asad137 · July 26, 2019

         given that curved sensors are used in astronomy

         Where? I’ve seen astronomical cameras that have curved focal planes but those are made by tiling individual flat sensors onto a curved mounting structure. I’ve never heard of one that uses acual curved sensors.

   5. Brandon Dube · July 25, 2019

      Making curved sensors is extremely difficult.

      1. Andreas Werle · July 27, 2019

         Hi Brandon!

         My speculation about curved sensors is the following:
         * either a (flexible) flat sensor, which is bended or
         * a (inflexible) flat sensor with a flat backside and an altered curved surface (pointing toward the lens)

         The first variant would require a bendable substrate material. I guess, that this can not be silicium, it would brake, when bended. If you bend an initially flat sensor in a fixed position, the pixelsensors (which are sitting on the bottom of a small tube) at the fringe of the sensor will point towards the optical axis, which is welcome for wideangel lenses but would result in vignetting in telecentric lenses. This could be avoided, either by microlenses on top of the pixel-element or if the bending is variable, which would require some adaptive elements (aktuators) at the margins of the sensor.

         The second variant would require a multilayered sensor (like the Foveon), but with much more layers. Around the optical Axis the pixelsensors may be situated at the deepest possible position and outer pixels in stepwise higher positions – like concentrical rings. This would be fine, because you can use silizium based integrated circuitry. But given the production process of multilayered microchips it makes me headache to imagine, how the connection between the different layers can be achieved.

         In result, i would prefer to idea of an “adaptive sensor”. This could either be a sensor, which consists of movable tiles of small sensors or by a correction layer before the sensor. A possibility would be a lenslet array, consisting of small moveabel microlenses – similar to the one used in a Shack–Hartmann wavefront sensor.

         Greetings Andy

         1. Franz Graphstill · July 27, 2019

            A flexible sensor might work for curving in one dimension (think curving a piece of film), but not in two dimensions. The goal is a sensor that’s curved like the human retina – like the inside of a ball. You won’t achieve that with a flexible sensor unless it can stretch!

   6. asad137 · July 26, 2019

      Maybe not “difficult” in absolute terms, but certainly significantly
      more difficult than making a flat sensor. The overwhelmingly vast
      majority of semiconductor fab processes out there in the world are based
      on processing flat wafers; to make a curved sensor, you either need to:

      a) start with a curved substrate, for which you’d have to design completely new processes, possibly new machines, etc, or

      b)
      build a curved surface up on a flat substrate and then figure out how
      to make a sensor on it, which leads you to many of the same problems as
      (a), or

      c) use a curved microlens array on top of a flat sensor
      (which comes with its own engineering challenges but is probably easier
      than making an actual curved sensor)Even if you can create a
      curved sensor, even that isn’t a panacea, because the ideal curvature
      for one lens isn’t going to be the same as for another, which is
      obviously a problem for interchangeable lens cameras — you can get the
      benefit of the curved sensor for one lens, but it might be worse than a
      flat sensor for others.

      If you google “fstoppers sigma curved sensor” you’ll find an article that discusses the latter point. I had linked to it but I think my post got caught in the post purgatory Roger mentions below.

      1. Andreas Werle · July 27, 2019

         Sorry asad137, guess, i had some similar ideas. 🙂

   7. Ciaran · August 15, 2019

      Having worked in the semiconductor industry for decades (although not in sensors), I think that making a curved digital sensor would be completely impractical.

      All the semiconductor processing steps – the growing and slicing wafers, all the many lithography, deposition, and etching steps, assume that the wafer is flat to withing nanometers. Maintaining planarity is extremely important to create nanometer sized features using photolithographic imaging. This involves ultra-violet light projected through really big lenses (f/0.37 in 35mm equivalence) to an ultaprecise focus on the wafer surface. It is very hard to do on a nearly perfectly flat surface – it would be quite impractical on a curved surface.

      The need for planarity is so great that in the later stages in the process, where layers of metal wires are being placed and connected, a technique called chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) is used after the deposition of each layer, where the surface of the wafer is precisely polished down to maintain the sub-optical planarity. Without this surface of the wafer would be too rough to image the next layer.

      Another basic limitation is that the electronic characteristics of silicon are anisotropic – they vary according to the plane of the silicon crystal. Devices built on a curved surface would have varying electronic properties that would make designing an accurate sensor difficult.

      One could imagine a science fiction reality where these limitations could be overcome and a curved sensor could be fabricated, but it would be astronomically expensive.

   8. Ashley Pomeroy · August 26, 2019

      I have an Agfa Clack, an old box brownie that takes 6×9 images on 120 film. The film curves around the inside-back of the camera, and I’ve always wondered what effect the curve has on the image quality. Perhaps it was made like that to combat field curvature. The image quality is surprisingly sharp for something so simple.

2. Andre Yew · July 22, 2019

   Roger, thanks for the f/4 vs. f/2.8 comparisons: you read my mind!

   But don’t your results also argue for doing stopped down measurements in order to understand which aberrations are limiting a lens’s performance? That is, it’s too simple to say that a lens stopped down will be better. Are there other ways to divine a lens’s objective performance from just the wide-open MTF results?

   1. Roger Cicala · July 22, 2019

      Andre, you are exactly right. Stopping down would give us a host of information. The trouble is, this whole setup exists to detect bad lenses and help us optically adjust them, all of which is done wide open. I can share those tests we have to do anyway, which are the wide open results. I can do a little free-time exploration, like the stop-downs above.

      But the blog (other than some positive PR) doesn’t generate enough revenue to begin to cover stop-down testing; best estimates are between 1.5 and 3 million dollars just to do the majority of lenses one and two stops down. I haven’t got that kind of funding, and no blog or testing site is likely to generate it.

      1. Andre Yew · July 22, 2019

         Yeah, I was just trying to give you a hard time! I think we all appreciate whatever information you can share, but one can always hope … The process sounds pretty time intensive: what’s the thing that takes the most time now?

         1. Roger Cicala · July 22, 2019

            With zooms it’s testing at 3 focal lengths. With some lenses setting the aperture is easy, just put it on the camera, hit the button to close to set aperture, take it off. With some, like the older Nikons, they don’t hold a camera setting so each lens has to be manually adjusted for proper aperture by ‘pinning’ the aperture lever. 3 or 4 zooms can take an entire day.

            In the bigger picture, the machine is used for required in-house testing. So to do stop downs I’d need to buy a new machine ($200k) and hire a tech to run it just for that purpose.

   2. Brandon Dube · July 25, 2019

      “I’d have to refer you to the report on that”

      static1 dot squarespace dot com/static/578d10066a4963fd85e0aa32/t/5af25e61aa4a99ed9ecfa39c/1525833475522/bdd_ug_thesis_10.pdf

      1. Andreas Werle · July 25, 2019

         Beautiful! 🙂

      2. Andre Yew · July 25, 2019

         Thanks Brandon! I’ll see how far I make it through the paper!

3. Max Manzan · July 22, 2019

   While I see that the Canon 4,0/70-200 II has excellent image quality on the whole, I really dislike its strong drop in tangential performace at the edges/corners of 70mm.

4. bwoodahl · July 23, 2019

   How many copies of the Nikon f/4 did you have open hand for this comparison? My f/4 is as sharp as my f/2.8, maybe I have a crappy 2.8?

   1. Roger Cicala · July 23, 2019

      16, it’s on the graph. If you have the new f2.8 ED I’d say definitely. If it’s the VR II, well, maybe you have a good f/4. I am assuming, of course, you’re not comparing your f/4 to the f/2.8 at f/2.8.

      1. bwoodahl · July 24, 2019

         Thanks. Crap, I think I need to check my f/2.8 FL ED against others. But I may just hold off for the Z-mount f/2.8 S. I’m guessing edge-to-edge it will (easily?) surpass the FL.

         1. Matti6950 . · July 25, 2019

            Nah i think it will be equal, maybe slight corner edge at f2.8 immediately gone at f4. Remember, the wider the angle, the more sharpness advantage Z mount has. But nikon has F-mount super sharp 28mm. Anything above is generally super sharp available. Sure nikon knocked it out of ballpark with FL ED. But it’s also tele (the range from where F-mount is not punishment that much). Much will depends also on how much they oversize the lens, and if they wanna dare the 3000 euro price tag again.

5. redwave18 · July 23, 2019

   Now I feel inadequate for having the original f4 IS version. How can I rest easy knowing another lens in the same class resolves a few more l/mm and every photo that I shoot will have missing info because of my feeble eyed lens.

6. Azmodeus · July 24, 2019

   Any chance of a test of the Tamron 70-210 f/4 Di VC for comparison Roger?

7. Dragon · July 24, 2019

   Hi Roger. It looks like in your Canon f/2.8 to f/4 (at f/4) comparison, the 70 mm f/4 lens curve is from the IS II version and the 200 mm curve is from the original IS version. So many charts so little time :-).

8. Misha Engel · July 25, 2019

   Would love to see the MTF chart from LensRentals of the FUJINON 19-90mm T2.9 Cabrio, against some competition (Zeiss, Canon, etc..)

   1. Roger Cicala · July 31, 2019

      Me too!

9. Ertan Ozturk · July 25, 2019

   “Some of you more strident Sony supporters will now state how wonderful it is and that the tests are wrong”
   You are being humble. Some “strident” Sony supporters will burn your house if they know where you live 🙂 Fanaticism has gained a new meaning and level with “strident” Sony trolls.
   Thanks for your hard work by the way. I know it is quite time consuming and exhausting doing all these tests, taking the charts, writing sentences that make sense and that will not make strident fans unhappy 🙂

   1. Ilya Snopchenko · September 3, 2019

      Like the – say – Canon diehards are any better? 🙂 I’ve been browsing a few photography forums (and am actively participating at one), and lots of people especially on the Canon side of life start foaming at the mouth at the mere mention of Sony (or even when this brand is implied in a conversation… Or sometimes even without any apparent implication), so let’s be fair here. 🙂

      Disclosure: I’m a longtime Canon user.

10. Roger Cicala · August 1, 2019

    No. No it doesn’t. It may change one thing. One aberration.
    Don’t quote the click-bait if you didn’t read the actual article. It was some nice math and it could correct spherical aberration, just that. Nothing more.

    1. Misha Engel · August 4, 2019

       When spherical aberration wouldn’t have been a big problem, why try to solve it?

       “The importance of solving this problem goes well beyond giving you a sharper picture of your feet for your nine Instagram followers. It would help make better and cheaper to manufacture optical systems in all areas, be it telescopes, microscopes, and everything in between.”

       “It is important to note that both solutions—the Wasserman-Wolf problem and the Levi-Cita problem—are analytical, with symbolic math. This means that the solution to a problem, no matter how you change the input variables, is unique and not an approximation.”

       Not could, it does solve the spherical aberration problem.

       1. Roger Cicala · August 5, 2019

          I totally agree that it can solve spherical aberration, one of the six primary aberrations and the one that is often best controlled. I am simply stating it does nothing for the other 5 primary aberrations, nor any of the well over a dozen common higher order aberrations.

          Why try to solve it? Because you’re a graduate student writing a paper; and he succeeded admirably at that. Could it be actually used? Sure it could, probably in post- but at least theoretically in camera. Would it be dramatically different and, as you say, “change everything”. Not even close, but it could possibly make a difference in some lens designs sometimes.

          But the headline “Graduate student’s paper could possibly lead to improvement in some lenses sometimes, at least in theory” wouldn’t have gotten your attention. The click-bait headline did.

          1. Nicholas Bedworth · August 14, 2019

             Roger is correct, as usual. We work with exotic computational imaging devices and sensors, and one thing to keep in mind is that some kind of theoretical insight that might possibly reduce one aberration doesn’t mean too much, compared to the overall process of building a physical lens system that will work across a range of temperature, wavelengths, focal lengths and so forth. Looking at one aberration in isolation isn’t likely to yield much of a practical benefit.

             The ambiguity function is a more generalized, fundamental way of visualizing aberrations as they occur in the Fourier space, where both modulation and phase transfer functions can be manipulated, prior to the light landing on the sensor. PhD optics programs teach it; most engineering programs usually stay with MTF. Another way to think about it is that all the aberrations fall under the category of distortion, and giving them separate names tends to give the impression that they are independently addressable, which isn’t really the case.

             So in the computational imaging approach, one could go after reducing the overall ambiguity function amplitudes, which is a more holistic way of reducing specific aberrations that might be an issue for a given application. And as other people have suggested, manufacturing and packaging considerations might well be more important than nailing a specific aberration.

             Hope this is helpful…

             Our scientists will lean back in their chairs, and start thinking about which combination of wavefront encoding and 10-15-20 layers of lens coatings will give the desired result. Aberration control is part of the discussion, but there are so many other issues: In the overall design process context, going from good to perfect spherical aberration reduction might make a vanishingly small contribution. Possibly it could introduce even problems somewhere else in the pipeline…

             1. Brandon Dube · October 20, 2019

                It is incredible that I have spent my entire career in optics among the grandfathers and fathers of aberration theory and physical optics and I have never heard of the ambiguity function.

                One might say that is tantamount to an existence proof it is not commonly used in optics.

                Your prose about aberrations is substantially incorrect as well.

                1. Nicholas Bedworth · October 22, 2019

                   Hi Brandon!

                   Ambiguity function crept into the optical world from radar engineering, perhaps 70 years ago (before you and I were born), and is primarily used today for Fourier space computational imaging systems. Optics, having been an area of human endeavor for perhaps 700+ years, is of course a vast and varied field and it’s probably impossible for any single person to know about all of them, or perhaps even 50% of them.

                   Research involving the ambiguity function for optics is referenced in a few hundred scientific papers, patent applications, and is incorporated into various textbooks as well. It’s perhaps not as popular as other conceptual frameworks, but I first became aware of it perhaps 45 years ago when working in x-ray imaging systems, where exploiting the ambiguity function is quite useful for retrieving phase information. And more recently, we used it in the design of a hand-held system for removing various artifacts from the image, wavelet encoding and so forth. Sort of a cool way to look at things…

       2. Brandon Dube · August 7, 2019

          It is unwise to take the word of a mathematically inclined graduate student propping their research up as revolutionary at its face. How does their horrible equation (good luck translating this between parties) make it cheaper to manufacture an optical system? Is a crazy shape full of wiggles cheaper to make than a sphere? I’ll give you a good hint: you can make an atomically “flat” sphere by rubbing a rock against another “kinda good sphere” for long enough.

          And what does this do for telescopes, which are dominated by reflective designs that have no use for an equation that makes S2 cancel exactly the spherical aberration in S1? If they wanted a spherical aberration free surface they would just use a parabola. But good telescope designs like the Ritchey-Chretien purposfully make the mirrors “almost parabolas” because it is a better solution.

11. Christopher J. May · August 2, 2019

    Roger, any theories on the crazy splits in the tangential and sagittal lines on the Sony at the edge of the frame, especially at 135mm? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such immediate variance in tan/sag lines like that.

    1. Roger Cicala · August 5, 2019

       Christopher, I’ve talked about that in some other Sony posts. It’s basically and artifact of testing with full-frame Sony lenses. The narrow backfocus distance at the very edges on some Sony lenses is right at the edge of the light baffles in the lens, causing either some diffraction or reflection at 20mm. I probably should put the blurb on every FE MTF chart but I forget; 20mm sagittal is a falsely high reading, the tangential should be accurate.

       Unfortunately, if I delete the 20mm reading, the software won’t accept the chart. And I can’t afford to rewrite the software again just for that bit.

       1. Christopher J. May · August 5, 2019

          Ah, gotcha. Thanks for the information, Roger. I guess I have missed some of the Sony write-ups in the past. I’ll go dig through those now!

          Thanks as always for the wonderful information you share!

12. Brandon Dube · August 7, 2019

    An element free of spherical aberration doesn’t do you that much good. Otherwise all of your camera lenses would just be parabolic mirrors, which are also perfect (zero spherical aberration of any order, zilch, nada) in the same sense.

    The manufactures don’t spend years and invest millions into the design of 20+ element bazookas because they need to keep the design departments busy.

13. Max Manzan · August 11, 2019

    I’ve been slowly moving from Canon DSLR to Sony FE for two years and still have 1 Canon body as well as several
    EF-lenses. Since I’m not a fanboy of any brand (ok ok, I have a slight weakness for Zeiss 😀 ) I will here and now make the official statement that: I haven’t yet bought either Sony FE 70-200, preferably the f/2.8, which is a very important focal range for me, because of the lensrentals MTF results.
    So Roger, Brandon and team, you are to be blamed for that.

    P.S. thank you guys for the invaluable job.

14. JordanCS13 · August 19, 2019

    I’m a Sony shooter, and while AF on the native Sony lens is better than adapting, I tested the Sony 70-200mm f/4 G against the old, original non-IS Canon 70-200mm f/4L, and the Canon was notably better throughout almost the entire zoom range, save for 135mm, where the Sony was just a smidge sharper at the edges. Needless to say, at 1/3 the price, I use the adapted Canon. I love a lot of my Sony glass, but their 70-200/4 is way overpriced for what you get.

15. thepaulbrown · August 19, 2019

    Just the MTF charts: Leica M mount lenses ??

16. Ilya Snopchenko · September 3, 2019

    Like the - say - Canon diehards are any better? :) I've been browsing a few photography forums (and am actively participating at one), and lots of people especially on the Canon side of life start foaming at the mouth at the mere mention of Sony (or even when this brand is implied in a conversation... Or sometimes even without any apparent implication), so let's be fair here. :)

    Disclosure: I'm a longtime Canon user.

17. Chris · September 9, 2019

    Thank you for the comparison, however, for the Canon 70-200/4 IS vs Non-IS, I think you got it the other way round… the IS Version was considered to be a bit sharper and this is what even Klaus Schroiff showed on his page… it was – at least on the EOS 350 – a pretty dramatical difference; no clue if your optical bench and the sample-to-sample variation would change this view but it would be a surprise if it would turn round the result for 180°…

18. Sator Photo · January 2, 2020

    Thank you as always for this invaluable information. I was studying this older post but couldn't help but notice the last line "a lot of Sony shooters prefer the Canon IS II f/4 on an adapter, and I can understand that option, too". Given the old post about how badly adapter degrade image quality, I was surprised to read this endorsement.

    https://www.lensrentals.com...

    Are there any MTF plots of Canon lenses mounted to the Sony FE mount using an adapter? My suspicion is that it would result in severe degradation of image quality, but would be curious to see how bad it really is.

19. Roger Cicala · January 5, 2020

    Not an endorsement, just a statement. I agree with your point, but the degredation is mostly edges / corners and a lot of people are using 70-200s basically for center shots. But mostly I think it’s a reflection of people not being thrilled with the Sony offerings and price point, along with the fact that many already have 70-200s from previous systems.

20. Matti6950 . · January 6, 2020

    I wonder why it gets this ‘negative’ around 70-200mm F4 lenses ‘okish, good, ‘but F2.8 amazingly better’. I shoot almost no details under 15 meter with my nikon 70-200mm F4. And it has by far the best sharpness of any zoom lens i own on nikon. No astigmatism. No CA sharpness drop. No decentering. Even sharpness across frame. Very good contrast. No notable field curvature, no serious vignetting i can spot, list goes on. at 116mm, (and also 70 and 130mm) i have shots, so sharp, only the better new primes can beat it at f8. With the recent tests showing f8 rarely cures corner issues, i’m a bit perplexed at how i can get pixel per pixel sharp images possible with this lens if it’s ‘just ok’? I don’t get it. I’ve seen nikon 70-200mm FL ED shots, they are only sharper at portrait distance, not at (far) landscape distance.

    My only clue is that perhaps the ‘infinity’ of lensrentals, while being almost true infinity still tests different then objects 200-2000 meter away, making the nikon there truly sharp (wich would be logical, as while it has good minimum focus distance it’s a bit softer there (trade off heh).

    Now to find a replacement for new Sony A7RIII. The hardest task so far. I’m almost wishing Sigma just makes 70-200mm sports os with maximum 1,5kg (same as sony gm) just to make me happy, it seems opportunity for them (and tamron) to lead the 70-200mm ‘performance’ gap in sony land. The 100-400mm GM is incredible tempting (seems better then other sony alternatives, but i want and need 70mm more.