Not sure if anybody is interested, but I’ll share this anyway… maybe someone stumples upon.
I had the time, to take some test shots with my 50mil lenses today. I have a couple of older manual focus lenses, that I wanted to test (to decide which ones to keep). I took shots with several apertures (max, F2.8, F4, F5.6 and F8) from this scene:
I compared the following lenses:
SAMYANG 45mm F1.8
ZEISS Tessar 50mm F2.8
CANON FD 50mm F1.4
SONY FE 50mm MACRO F2.8
MINOLTA MD 50mm F1.4
PENTAX 50mm F1.4
SIGMA 28-50mm F2.8
All the shots were manually focussed and taken on a tripod. I decided to take all shots with the same shutter speed of 1/50s (the smaller apertures came out darker obviously, this was intended, as I tried to create a more difficult environment for the lens).
In darktable I brought all pictures to the same brightness via exposure and tone curve (same TC for all pictures). I set the input profile and cropped to the same area. And I set the WB of course.
After that, I exported and tiled the images with image magick. In the columns are the different apertures and in the rows the different lenses.
You got me confused and intrigued there for a moment … because when I read 50mil of course I thought about electronics and PCB design and “who makes lenses that small, now that’s going to be an interesting test!”.
That is an interesting comparison. i particularly appreciated the manifacturing of the “object”, i.e. the final jpeg you shared to see at 100% (I am also a fan of command line tools like imagemagick).
However, about the actual results – it would be good to have your conclusion on this test, because what I conclude is that all these lenses are more or less the same to me!
“More or less” is obviously the key here; I mean I can certainly see the differences between shooting wide open and closing down, which is what we as photographers normally do and know, but if I’d have to choose between one lens and the other… i would end up getting the cheaper or lighter one (which are my guiding principles by the way).
But maybe I havent looked closely enough!
Finally another two vaguely related thoughts:
we should probably stop looking at walls as a way to judge the quality of lenses (even though I know this is easier to set up!)
your analysis made me check back at the results of my latest 50mm (Canon RF 1.8, another of the many lenses that I have that are cheap and light); I can definitely see now the improvements in how good this lens is – compared to the old Nikon 50/1.4 AF where the difference between f2.8 and f8 is vast while the Canon from f2.8 onwards is always sharp.
Thanks for asking. I did not include a conclusion initially, because I didn’t want to prime the audience. Also, its just to incomplete of a test, to draw final conclusions.
That said, I think you are spot on. I mean, the Zeiss can not keep up and with open aperture there are differences. But otherwise, none of these lenses will prevent a good picture.
I don’t think these theories add up and raw development plays a much bigger role. Sure there are good and bad lenses, but it isn’t as easy as counting the number of glass elements…
Yes I support that: cheaper, lighter and the handling overall.
I’m on your side. This was just an artificial test with a special purpose.
Thank you for doing this. I did something similar myself a while ago and arrived at the same conclusion. The only way it affected my editing in Darktable is that I realized that some modern lenses are just “too sharp” in the sense that they give me sharp details even when those are a distraction, so I now use a masked contrast equalizer to remove sharpness from regions which I don’t want to emphasize. This does give me a nice “pop”.
The bottom row says it uses a filter, what kind of filter and what did you test for?
About that pop … my guess is this initially came from some lenses with a wavy focus plane, so not a plane at all. Especially some of the older M-mounts were designed that way. Which fits nicely, because if you would look down on the area in focus it would be an M or W depending on the direction. Modern lenses give in to the wall-testing crowd and are more like a dash — super flat.
If you use such a lens at its widest aperture(s) the transitions between in focus and out of focus create this strong 3D effect because they emphasize the depth of any object.
Since those old lenses are usually a lot softer than modern day creations this effect does not look bad but rather nice and interesting.
At least that is my verdict from testing and using various generations of (mostly Nikon) lenses and reading a lot of the lens tests by Roger Cicala — the mythbuster of photography.
I didn’t know about him, so I want to thank you for mentioning him — his blog and other writings are a treasure vault of information about lenses. I can hardly stop reading about lenses (and I have to get back to work now )
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