This is likely Canon’s lens roadmap for 2020

[Michael Clark]

Thanks for the lecture, Mikey, though we all know this. Your initial, and quite mistaken, claim wasn't about lens designs but lenses themselves. I'm kind of insulted that you think the readership of this forum would forget your initial thesis and applaud your scrambling attempt to support it, but no, we can scroll up and see what you were initially talking about. When you're caught out wrong, just admit it and learn something. Don't double down on stupid.

What I originally said was:

"The EF 50mm f/1.2 was not primarily designed to be the sharpest lens around. It was designed to do other things, because back then most folks cared more about how the actual photos they took looked than how sharp they could take a photo of a flat test chart. Some of us still do, but the flat test chart lenses are what sell now, even if the out of focus areas don't look near as good as some of the older lenses do."


Nothing I've said since backs away from that in any way. It was not designed to be a Macro lens. Canon already had plenty of Macro lenses when the EF 85mm f/1.2 L ( and later EF 85mm f/1.2L II) was introduced. Flat field performance was not the overriding design feature that lens was created to meet. Disagree all you want, but that doesn't change the facts. If Canon had wanted to create an 85mm lens with superior flat field performance they'd already previously demonstrated rather well that they could have done so. They didn't, ergo that was not what they created the 85/1.2 to do.

 

[Michael Clark]

Thanks to these factors, the very sharpest lenses made today (Canon RF 50/1.2, Otus 50/1.4, Leica APO-Summicron 50/2) simply couldn't have been made a decade or two ago. The RF 50/1.2 is about 10x sharper than the EF 50/1.2 it replaces. You can see it's 30 lp/mm lines are higher than the old lens' 10 lp/mm lines; >3x sharper linearly is >9x sharper by area. If they could have done that 10 years ago they would have!

On the other hand, you seem to forget that you said no one could make a lens like the RF 50/1.2 a decade ago and then criticize a lens designed more than a decade ago for not meeting a standard you just claimed couldn't be matched at that time.