Lenses, sharpness, and image quality

Just reading Ming Thien's review of the Ricoh GR and was struck by his description of the lens:

"Throughout the testing, I couldn’t help but feel that the lens retains something of the character of the original GR1v’s lens; moderate overall contrast, moderate microcontrast, fairly good resolution wide-open (but clearly better stopped down) and a tendency towards warm transmission. There’s a sort of ’rounded smoothness’ about the rendering rather than the modern contrast-plus biting sharpness of the Nikon Coolpix A."

This is the kind of difference I see in the sharpness of the Olympus 40-150 zoom on one hand and the Oly 45 on the other although I wouldn’t suggest the 45 has cooler than normal transmission or is too aggressively sharp.

It was also a feature of the Canon 7s rangefinder's 35mm f1.5 lens I had back in the day (practically fuzzy at 1.5 but sharp as from f2 albeit with a kind of smoothness about it. And my OM1 pix with Zuiko lenses 21mm~200mm range, also had that quality.

I chuckled to myself, though, when I read "modern contrast-plus biting sharpness of the Nikon". When did "modern" start? Nikkor lenses were famous for that way, way back in the day. And I mean the start of the 60s (and probably before). Biting sharpness, high micro andmacro contrast, coldish transmission gave a slightly clinical appearance -- you could look at a bunch of Kodachromes and pick out the Nikon ones.

Cheers, geoff

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Geoffrey Heard
http://pngtimetraveller.blogspot.com/2011/10/return-to-karai-komana_31.html