Michael Clark said:

What I am saying is that acutance measured using a two-dimensional test chart parallel to the camera's sensor tells you nothing about bokeh. Absolutely nothing.

Words from the mouth of Roger Cicala in an article titled Why I Don't Use An MTF Bench To Test My Own Lenses:


Another of Roger's articles at his lensrentals blog: Everything but the Sharpness




All lens design is compromise. The flat field correction needed to make a flat test chart look sharper on the edges very often makes out of focus objects harsher and busier than designs that are not made for potential buyers who are obsessed with how well a lens reproduces flat test charts above all else.

Click to expand...

snapshot said:

Lots of folks just want to take a picture, and hope it will turn out better than a phone pic. R100 vs T7 with a 17-55 kit zoom either one at bestbuy under $600. sure, maybe not for me. but i might have already bought my last camera (r5iii with 2x faster read-out could get me to buy one more if i am still shooting action when it arrives). i think there is value in a product that will on-board new buyers. i think the r100 hate is all about the lack of a touch screen, not sure how deep into the menus the new user gets and the buttons work fine.

Click to expand...

Michael Clark said:

I think the FS-1 I bought used had been traded in for an FT-1 not long after the FT-1 came out. It's been 40 years but I'm pretty sure that is what the salesman at Camera World in Charlotte, NC told me. The building they were in is long gone and the U.S. 74 freeway passes over where it was. Back in the 1980s U.S. 74 was a street level road that passed a block or two from the camera store. My FS-1 still had a nice form-fitting cloth-lined leather case on it, the lower half of which stayed on when you shot with the camera. I guess the case for the FS-1 wouldn't fit the FT-1 so the previous owner left it on when they traded it in?

I never noticed a flare issue. I did tend to shoot in more subdued lighting most of the time when I used the 40mm prime, though. The length of the 28-210mm lens I used on daylight probably eliminated most off axis light long before it reached the light box. It could vignette pretty heavily in the frame at wider angles of view.

Click to expand...

neuroanatomist said:

I’ve never had a filter get stuck on a lens. I have had stacked filters get stuck together (ND and CPL), and I learned to keep a set of $8 filter wrenches in the bag when I bring filters.

Click to expand...

Michael Clark said:

Part of Roger's consideration is that even though he knows a minor scratch won't affect photos in any real way, such a scratch does affect many who would rent a lens from his business that arrives with such a scratch. It's the same thing with internal dust. He knows it doesn't really affect photos taken with the lens unless it's really full of dust, but they still clean them regularly at lensrentals because their customers won't tolerate lenses with very much dust in them.

Click to expand...

Canon Rumors said:

Thanks for that, I knew I'd get something wrong, even after 3 spell checks and multiple read-overs

Click to expand...

DocInfoSci said:

Haha — I was just thinking that this morning in the shower.

Building on what you said...

While acknowledging that lenses can be used in many ways, let's look at this from the concept of matched perspective:

Let's say I have a 45mm or 50mm lens equivalent and I find my friend standing.

First, I decide to plant my tripod, mount my camera, and then take a 2/3rds body photo that nicely captures my friend, with a very minimal hint of where they are or what they are up to. I then swap my 50mm for a 100mm and, without moving the tripod, take a tight shot of their face: great eyes, nice hair, good looking person all-around. I then, again without moving my tripod, place my 24mm lens and take another photo — now we see they're at a park with trees and path. I repeat with my 20mm to emphasize the context a little more. I've now told a small story about my friend. Interestingly, because I didn't move at all, my lenses simply served to crop the scene to focus on one aspect or the other; the relative position of everything remains the same as they come into the picture. If I digitally crop my 20mm to be like the 24, or the 24 to be like the 50 then the placement of trees relative to the person and any other object remains generally the same but the amount of scene included does change. My perspective never changed from where my tripod was planted relative to the person — I simply showed more less of the world relative to that person.

Second, I instead decide to zoom with my feet and whether the 24mm or 50mm or 100mm I frame my friend to fill the sensor approximately the same: how the person looked and how objects around them appeared in relative position would change significantly. Trees would seem very close or very far away, as an example, regardless of how I might digitally crop the photos later.

So for people who shoot with primes the options matter if they are attempting to tell a story with the same perspective but different amounts of the world included in the scene. And approximately doubling the mm's from one prime to the next allows for meaningful jumps in scene crop factor to allow for different meaningful reflections on the subject without distorting the scene or subject from one photo to the next.

The Milky Way is a great extreme example because no matter where you walk to on your chosen continent your relative position to the galactic core is effectively the same: choose a 14mm, 20mm, 24mm, 35mm, etc. and you can digitally crop from wider to longer and achieve the same relative content with less scene.

You can reproduce this example with a zoom, such as 16-35 or 24-105: plant a tripod, choose a subject, take photos at different lengths, and then crop the widest to match something tighter and observe that the relative position of objects in the scene does not change.

Click to expand...

gdanmitchell said:

For those of us who started early with digital cameras, the original 5D was a watershed camera — a full frame camera that we could (perhaps barely) afford. A 5D was my first full frame body. It wasn’t perfect (it was a dust magnet, it wasn’t particularly fast, and it lacked capabilities we now take for granted), but it was a significant step up from teh 8MP APS-C bodies that were the contemporary alternative.

The 5D began to show the potential of the 5D line, with much higher resolution, live view (a boon to landscape photographers), video, and other improvements. For those like me, who used these cameras for landscape photography and similar subjects, the 5Ds and 5DsR were another big step forward, offering resolution that Canon can’t match with its current mirrorless bodies. (I still rely on my 5DsR.) The 5DIII and 5DIV continued to advance and distill the 5D concept.

Click to expand...

NRN said:

Smallrig is worse than any other manufacturer according to this review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pe-_BFC21gs&t=109s
Why is this promoted?

Click to expand...

el peso said:

Is R5 Mark II any worse? Would you cry about original R5? So why all this funeral wailing?

Click to expand...

DocInfoSci said:

I'd go for mechanically linked focus with full time manual override and an external distance / depth of field gauge. Everything else can remain the same that would be compatible with those requirements.

Click to expand...

Malm said:

And when will Canon start again to make proper lenses for photographers?
To be honest; I'm sick of these hyped VCM lenses for videographers - so called 'creators'. All I need are just excellent optical lenses without much 'digital correction' and also without this strict size and weight limits as for VCM lenses.
Canon already has an extended line of these light and good video lenses, so what about the very good lenses for photographers?

Click to expand...