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.
Posts by Roger Cicala · page 13 of 39
Zeiss Milvus Optical Bench Tests
When Zeiss announced the new Milvus lens lineup, there was a mixture of excitement and yawns. In part, I blame Zeiss’ marketing department for the yawns. OK, I shouldn’t be harsh. I shouldn’t, but I will. I’m certain a lot of people are perfectly comfortable just knowing that the new lenses will…
Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 ED AF-S VR Sharpness & Optical Bench Testing
Like a lot of people, we were pretty excited to get our hands on the new Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E ED AF-S VR lens. Compared to the other brand’s 24-70mm zooms, the original Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8 ED AF-S wasn’t quite as good at the outer part of the frame, and just wasn’t as good at 70mm. I expected the…
Sony E Mount Lens Optical Bench Tests
It has taken a long time, the sacrifice of a couple of cameras and lenses, and a lot of soldering, but we have finally managed to rig up a powered Sony mount to our optical bench so that we can test the new full-frame Sony and Sony-Zeiss E-mount lenses. For those of you who haven’t understood why…
35mm f/1.4 Shootout: Canon 35mm f/1.4L II VS Sigma 35mm Art VS Canon 35mm f/1.4L I
Yes, indeed, I learned my lesson. I’ve had MTFs on a few copies of the Canon 35mm f/1.4 Mk II lens for a while now, but I wasn’t about to publish the results until I had a full 10-sample group done to get a thorough look at them. If you don’t like pretty graphs, then I’ll give you the quick summary…
A Clear History of Glass
I’ve written about glass, as in lenses, for years now. But I’ve never looked into the history of glass as just a substance, because, well, who cared? When I accidentally did some reading about early glass, though, I was rather amazed at just how important it was. So I thought I’d write about the…
Sigma 24-35mm f/2 DG HSM Art MTF Curves and Sample Variation
For years now, I’ve been telling people to always take the results of tests done on one copy of a lens with a serious grain of salt. Not matter how carefully it was tested, it’s still just one copy. Others will be worse. Others will be better. Because I’m so aware of copy variation, I (in theory at…
Canon 100-400 IS II MTF and Variation Tests
When the Canon 100-400 f/4-5.6 IS L Mk II lens was first released we immediately did some testing. First we took one apart and were extremely impressed with the build quality. Then we compared it using Imatest to the original Canon 100-400 IS L and the new Canon 400mm DO L IS Mk II lenses at 400mm.…
Cine Lens Teardown Comparison: Zeiss 85mm CP.2 T2.1 and Rokinon Xeen 85mm T1.5
I was pretty excited when I first heard about the Rokinon Xeen line of Cinema lenses. For several years now, Samyang / Rokinon photography lenses have given photographers with reasonable expectations some superb alternatives. They sell optically excellent lenses at amazingly low prices. There are…
MTF and Variation: An Example
We’ve spent most of the last month establishing a database of MTF curves and expected copy-to-copy variation for a number of lenses. Most people have a general idea about what we’re doing, can follow along the basics of MTF curves, etc. But many other people also have a very good question, “How…
70-200mm f/2.8 MTF and Variations
Finally, the last in our series of MTF and variation tests is here. We’ll be doing these going forward as new lenses are released but for now we’ve got a nice database of common lenses that we can measure others against. We’ve completed almost all of the common prime lenses, along with wide and…
Wide-Angle Zoom MTF and Variations
We recently published the MTF and variation curves of standard range lenses and now are going to tackle wide-angle zooms. As we’ve seen, zooms have more variation than primes and wide-angle primes have more variation than standard range primes. Also, the MTF curves of wide-angle primes are weaker…
Quick MTF of the Tokina 24-70 f/2.8 PRO Fx
* Courtesy Tokina, USA * Tokina is releasing a new competitor in the 24-70mm f/2.8 standard zoom lens group. It’s a reasonably sized lens, having an 82mm diameter front ring, measuring 4.25 inches long, and weighing 2.2 pounds. That’s just a bit smaller and lighter than the Tamron 24-70mm f/2.8 VC…