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 20 of 39
Assumptions, Expectations, and Plastic Mounts
Photography companies love catchword marketing. They like catchwords because photographers make assumptions about what those words mean, even though the words really don’t mean anything. So basically, they say nothing, but it makes you believe something. Two of my favorite examples are…
A Bit of A7R Sanity
A while back I wrote a post I humbly called Roger’s Law of New Product Introduction, complete with the graph shown below. The release of the Sony A7R has demonstrated the accuracy of that post as few other releases have. A few weeks after the A7R release we seem to be following the path quite…
Sony A7R: A Rising Tide Lifts All the Boats?
I have to admit I didn’t get too worked up when the Sony A7 and A7R were released. The last time I wrote about Sony it was how there were so few lenses for the NEX system years after introduction. So now we’re going to a system requiring a whole new lens mount. Sure the camera’s specs were…
Iceland Spar: The Rock That Discovered Optics
Every year, I can’t think of anything I want for Christmas. So this year, I was pretty excited to come home and tell my wife, “I know exactly what I want for Christmas. A nice big piece of Iceland spar.” I even sent her a link to make it easy. (It’s certainly a comment on our times that I sent a…
Metabones Blackmagic
Metabones, maker of the impressive Speedbooster adapters is back at it again. When the Speedbooster first came out, I wrote about it being like magic, increasing the aperture and field-of-view of Nikon and Canon full-frame lenses mounted to NEX and micro 4/3 cameras, while maintaining or even…
Photo Geek Contest 2013 Winners
I am the poster child for that old saying, “Be careful what you ask for. You might get it.” I thought it would be fun to have a little contest just for the Photo Geeks who read my blog posts. I thought maybe 10 or 15 people would enter and we’d be like the 8 year-old soccer team: Trophies and pizza…
The Cynic’s Photography Dictionary
Picture – A representation in two dimensions of something wearisome in three. _Ambrose Bierce_ I’m a fan of the satirical and cynical definitions of Ambrose Bierce, first written as a daily newspaper column and later collected in The Devil’s Dictionary. (It was originally called the Cynic’s Word…
Otus is Scharf
I’m probably setting myself up for a replay of the Exo Tria Arxidia scene, but my friend Bernhard introduced me to the German term _scharf_ the other day. It can mean both sharp and hot (as in spicy, or as in, you know, hot). After testing our first copies of the Zeiss 55mm f/1.4 Otus lens I felt…
Inspecting an ‘In Spec’ Lens
I’m going to open a can of worms today. I’ve been getting more and more emails from people telling me the same story that goes like this: > I’ve got this lens. It’s awful. I’ve sent it in for adjustment and the service center tells me it’s ‘in spec’ and nothing is wrong with it. Am I crazy? Second…
Nikon 58mm f/1.4 is (hopefully) Not About the Numbers
## The Silence We have a routine when a new lens comes out at Lensrentals: the first new copies get sent to me for optical testing. I have about 4 or 5 hours with them because they’ll have to be packed up and shipped out to the customers that have been waiting for them and expect them tomorrow. So…
D610 Initial Dust Assessment
Way back when, I wrote about the dust problems we were seeing in Nikon D600 cameras. There was enough of a furor about it that when the Nikon D610 was released I assumed that the dust problem would be fixed. But I’m rather the paranoid type, and I never like assumptions, so as soon as the first…
Photo Geek Awards Get No Respect
When I came up with the idea for the Photogeek Geek Photo Contest, it was mostly for fun. I didn’t think too many people would actually enter. But at last count there are nearly 100 entries up on the contest page already. There are even a couple of people who managed to capture the bokeh of a…