Lenses and Optics
Things You Don’t Know About Stopping Down Your Lens
Warning: This is a somewhat Geeky article. It has some real points that are useful for anyone who uses lenses, though, so I’ve tried to keep it mostly in English. In imaging, there are a lot of topics where people over-generalize; there’s a general tendency for something to happen, but people…
MTF Tests of the Sigma 35mm f/1.2 DG Art
We just finished testing a couple of 35mm prime lenses and came away quite impressed. But it took a little longer to finish testing the one everyone had been asking about; the Sigma 35mm f/1.2 DG Art lens. I declared the Tamron 35mm f/1.4 SP the sharpest 35mm lens we had tested just a week ago, so…
Some New Wide Angle Lens MTF Tests: Sony 24mm f1.4 GM; Sony 35mm f/1.8; Tamron 35mm f1.4 SP
Most of you MTF junkies are aware that I’ve published all of our prime lens MTF curves in a series of articles by brand, and that I said I would just add new lenses to those articles. I recently tested a series of new prime lenses, though, and thought they were also worth putting up together…
Helping Determine the Correct Focal Length for Photography & Videography
Here at Lensrentals.com, we get asked a common question on the daily, which is something to the regards of “I’m shooting X, what do you think the best focal length(s) would be?” By definition, this is an impossible question to answer completely and would need a multitude of variables before we…
Just the MTF Charts: 70-200mm f/4 Zoom Lenses
We did the 70-200mm f/2.8 lens MTF charts last week, so let’s do the f/4 versions of the same range now. Sports shooters and portrait photographers need that f/2.8 aperture, but many of us, most of the time, are willing to trade that off for smaller-lighter-less expensive f/4 models. ### So, About…
Just the Cinema MTF Charts: Tokina and Veydra Primes
The Zeiss post was really long, this one is pretty short. I will mention again, these are less than 10 copy averages; we don’t carry a lot of these lenses. But there’s no MTF data elsewhere for them, so I will put out what we have. A Quick How to on Reading MTF Charts If you’re new here, you’ll see…
Just the Cinema MTF Charts: Zeiss Cine Lenses
Zeiss makes a lot of cinema lenses, there are a lot of graphs in this post. Please remember for some, like the Supreme Primes and some of the CP.3 lenses we didn’t get much access to, the MTF graph is the average of just a few copies (the number of copies is identified on the graph). This will be…
Just MTF Charts: Perspective Control Lenses
I had a little hesitation about whether we should post these. Most people considering a tilt-shift aren’t thinking ‘I want the absolute best sharpness.” Plus what we show is the MTF without the lens tilted or shifted, both of which will affect the resolution to some degree, but you’re probably…
Just MTF Charts: Nikon Prime Lenses
We’ll continue our just MTF chart series of posts with the Nikon brand prime lenses. For those of you who have been asking, The Digital Picture is going to add all our MTF graphs to their comparison tool as we release them. That will let you do logical comparisons like ‘is the Sony 135mm f/1.8 GM…
Removing a Fly from ‘Weather Sealed’ Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS II
I’ve been doing lens stuff for a long time now. Long time. Trust me; it’s hard to remain polite the 843,911th time some newbie goes into hysterics because there’s dust in their lens. Telling them it doesn’t matter a bit, and that all their other lenses have dust they just can’t see ( because…
Just MTF Charts: Sony FE Mount Prime Lenses
This is the fourth post publishing all of our MTF results so that methodology is consistent and they are easy to find. The previous have been by lens brand. This one is by the mount, since the Zeiss Batis and Loxia lenses fit more naturally here than with the Zeiss SLR lenses. Otherwise, no…
Just MTF Charts: Sigma Prime Lenses
This is the third post publishing all of our MTF results so that methodology is consistent and they are easy to find. No comparisons, no commentary, just the test results for you to use and abuse as you see fit. We’ll continue today with the Sigma prime lenses. For those who wonder, the results…