History of Photography

I’m Gonna Party Like It’s 1995

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I doubt any of you remember it, but 1995 was the coming out party for Digital SLRs. There had been digital cameras before then. There had even been digital SLR cameras of a sort – modified cameras tethered to a hard drive — before then. But in 1995 camera makers released digital SLR cameras for […]

Lenses and Optics

Comparing Rangefinder and SLR 50mm Lenses. (Version 0.7)

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Well before our Imagemaster optical bench was delivered, I knew what I wanted to do first: compare some Leica lenses with the best SLR lenses on a level playing. I did one comparison involving Leica lenses a long time ago, but Leica lenses are difficult to test in our Imatest lab. It’s nothing to do with Imatest or the lenses; simply […]

Technical Discussions

A Data Processing Contest

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OK, when I introduced our new optical bench, I mentioned that it generates a lot of data. We gathered data for a nice comparison test (I mean who wouldn’t want to know how the Zeiss Otus and Sigma 50mm f/1.4 Art stack up against some nice Leica 50mm lenses). Since then I’ve spent about 20 […]

Other

Introducing the Optical Bench

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Note: This is a Geek article. If you aren’t into geeky stuff, you won’t be into this. “We take a step back so that we may leap further.” African proverb I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago about our first copies of the Sigma 50mm Art lens, and promised to follow up when […]

Lenses and Optics

MTF – The English Translation

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This post contains absolutely no mathematics. Explaining MTF without math is sort of like doing a high-wire act without a net. It’s dangerous, but for any number of reasons is more likely to keep the audience interested. Why Am I Doing This Again? I wrote an article on reading MTF charts several years ago. It […]

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