I'm shooting with mid range lenses and generally pretty happy with the results, I'm also caring less and less about resolution as a differentiator between images.. light, composition, subject all trump the technical side, so I've become more concerned about effects you can see in small prints or web size images. If an image I take doesn't work at web size then I'll cull it. So I've changed to caring about technical aspects that show in small shots.
The biggies are :
Boke and OOF effects.
Contrast & Colour.
AF accuracy/consistancy.
Boke and AF are well covered across the net, but Contrast and Colour?
I understand that coatings do a lot to improve lenses Colour and contrast. A good coating will not produce reflections that could otherwise produce diffuse and highly out of focus washes of light across the sensor, thus reducing contrast and muddying colours, especially if those washes have any colour to them due to variaitions in performance of coatings with wavelength.
So.. if coatings can improve colours then they are good, and there must be a quatifiable test for this, and so I dug around and found this:
http://www.imatest.com/docs/veilingglare/
They have tested a very small handful of lenses.. but try as I might no one else seems to be doing this test or anything else that is useful in any real way.
DPreview : no
DXOmark : no
TDP : well they do a test but the result is highly subjective, I certainly can't compare lenses using it.
Dustin : a comment here and there on "strong contrast", difficult to compare lens to lens.
photozone.de : no
and just for fun this is what you get without coatings: http://nofilmschool.com/2012/12/whats-special-about-uncoated-lenses
So anyone come across a site that measures lens contrast?
The biggies are :
Boke and OOF effects.
Contrast & Colour.
AF accuracy/consistancy.
Boke and AF are well covered across the net, but Contrast and Colour?
I understand that coatings do a lot to improve lenses Colour and contrast. A good coating will not produce reflections that could otherwise produce diffuse and highly out of focus washes of light across the sensor, thus reducing contrast and muddying colours, especially if those washes have any colour to them due to variaitions in performance of coatings with wavelength.
So.. if coatings can improve colours then they are good, and there must be a quatifiable test for this, and so I dug around and found this:
http://www.imatest.com/docs/veilingglare/
They have tested a very small handful of lenses.. but try as I might no one else seems to be doing this test or anything else that is useful in any real way.
DPreview : no
DXOmark : no
TDP : well they do a test but the result is highly subjective, I certainly can't compare lenses using it.
Dustin : a comment here and there on "strong contrast", difficult to compare lens to lens.
photozone.de : no
and just for fun this is what you get without coatings: http://nofilmschool.com/2012/12/whats-special-about-uncoated-lenses
So anyone come across a site that measures lens contrast?
