Roger Cicala
I'm Roger and I am the founder of Lensrentals.com. Hailed as one of the optic nerds here, I enjoy shooting collimated light through 30X microscope objectives in my spare time. When I do take real pictures I like using something different: a Medium format, or Pentax K1, or a Sony RX1R.
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Still Tearing It Up: Teardown of the Sony PTZ FR7
### A Birthday Teardown Let’s talk about the Pink Elephant in the room and get that out of the way. I ghosted you, I know. It wasn’t my plan, but sometimes shirt happens. Kind of a perfect storm of shirts, actually. There was Covid when everything came to a halt, and we wondered for most of a year…
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Disassembling the Lumix S Pro R70-200mm f/4 OIS
We’ve been impressed with most of the lenses that have come out for the L mount cameras but haven’t taken many of them apart. But as luck would have it, we have several Panasonic Lumix Pro 70-200mm f/4 OIS lenses needing repairs for autofocus issues. In the U. S., Panasonic doesn’t offer repair…
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A Brief History of Early Lenses: Part 1
### Things Have Been Around Longer Than You Think We are all recent-centric. We tend to think the technology we use didn’t exist until last year or so, even though the roots of it go way back. Phone apps are a great example. I have a dozen little apps on that phone that do things like calculate…
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Why Manufacturers Make a Specific Camera Lens
### A Camel is a Horse Designed by Committee There is a lot of online discussion about why a manufacturer made this lens when they so obviously needed to make that other lens. Or why this manufacturer’s design is better than that manufacturer’s magical solutions. So, I thought I’d share the…
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Selecting the Proper Brick Wall for Photographic Tests
Many amateurs test their lenses by taking pictures of the nearest brick wall without logically thinking about what information that particular wall provides. Done properly, a brick wall test can provide a superb evaluation of your lens. But a poorly done brick wall test is really no better than…
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Sony FE 20mm f/1.8 G Optical Tests
I haven’t published much optical testing in the last year for many reasons; some obvious, some not. But published or not, we still test things, and occasionally something comes up that I think I need to write up. The Sony FE 20mm f/1.8 G is one of those things. As wide-angle primes go, it’s…
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The Secret of the Broken Element: A Canon RF 100-500mm f4.7-7.1 Teardown
In ancient times, the IS unit in Canon EF lenses was physically locked down, so the unit didn’t make rattling noises when the lens wasn’t powered up. Canon decided the lockdown was no longer necessary in modern times, so some RF lenses, like the Canon RF 100-500mm f/4.5-7.1, rattled when the lens…
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Investigating the Canon R5 Heat Emission
_ADDENDUM: I should have mentioned in the text, all testing was done at 73°F (22.75C) ambient temperature._ Lots and lots of people are talking about Canon R5 heat cut-offs. The discussions range from technical discussions about heat generation, cooling methods, and firmware protocols to strident…
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Taking Apart the Canon EOS R5 Mirrorless Camera
Let’s get one thing out of the way in the first sentence. If you’re here to understand the mysteries of thermal flow in the Canon R5 I can tell you everything I know without doing a teardown: It’s small, it’s weather-sealed, and photo-body cameras have limited ability to get heat out of the camera.…
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The Fujifilm GFX 100 vs Salt Water Teardown
So today is “Every Dark Cloud Has a Silver Lining Day.” The dark cloud involves a Fujinon GFX100 medium format camera that went out on rental, got used in a dive housing, and ‘suddenly died for no reason.’ Except on further investigation, well, maybe it got a little wet, but just a bit, but it was…
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Taking Apart the Canon RF 600mm f/11 IS STM
Here I sit, the guy who gets poetic writing about tiny resolution differences in high-priced wide-aperture lenses, having just bought this lens. Its aperture is in the diffraction-softening range. The manufacturer’s (pronounced ‘better than reality’) MTF charts aren’t very good. So why did I buy…
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MTF Tests of the Tamron 17-28mm and 28-75mm f/2.8 Di III RXD Lenses
Tamron has a nice set of three f/2.8 zooms for Sony E mount cameras. Today I’m putting out MTF results for the 17-28mm f/2.8 Di III RXD and the 28-75mm f/2.8 Di III RXD. They offer a reasonably priced alternative to Sony-branded lenses, and Tamron has been making good products lately. I’ll admit to…
