How good lenses do we need? How good todays lenses are?

Dear all,

I do not know that so I am just asking/guessing here.

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness e.t.c but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Give me your thoughts and ideas here.

Regards

Alex

Dervast said:

Dear all,

I do not know that so I am just asking/guessing here.

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness e.t.c but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Give me your thoughts and ideas here.

Click to expand...

All valid points and questions. I think today's lenses are in general better than yesterday's lenses. Manufacturing advances have allowed that. But not all are good or great - plenty of duds out there.

And there were very good lenses from back in the day that are still valid today - Canon CD 85 1.2 L for example.

So I think it still is a good idea to review a lens you might be interested in - make sure it's not a dud in some way. Read up as much as you can and of course look for all the image samples you can get because what may not review particularly well may turn out to be quite nice for you.

If someone is pretty good at Photoshop and they have a good amount of time to post then they don't need good lenses. Or even sharp. I find that a big benefit of having a good lens cuts down on workflow by a huge amount. Especially when you've got photos to deliver in a timely manner.

Hello! I like to make the comparison with music, a good lens is like getting a good acoustic guitar, price matches its quality and certainly a good guitar of 30 years will sound crisp and nice today. However before we didnt have other equipment to play, now you can to put a microphone over the guitar to capture the sound and stream it but is limited. Now you can get a slighter cheaper guitar with entry plug and over processing (pedals, filters etc) not only you can improve the sound but have other options. I also believe that is the instrument (camera/lens) is only half of everything, the place you play is the other half (you can get a kit lens, in a sunny day or plenty flashes and you will get great pics).

In other words, Im sure you have already seen the wonders of Lr and Ph, if you get a good deal on a lens or you wanted, go for it... but new gear is easier to go with all this nice tools.

LG

New lenses seem to be tailored to deliver nearer their best at full aperture, whatever that is. They are notably more contrasty than those old lenses. For instance that Minolta f1.4 didn't look good until f2.8, third party zooms could take even longer. Not any more. Mind you, manufacturers don't seem to care about controlling distortion, vignetting or aberration in the corners so much, as if it can all be cure digitally.

The craze for wide open performance does at least mean cheap zooms are actually surprisingly impressive performers for all their plastic and lack of light gathering capability.

ambercool said:

If someone is pretty good at Photoshop and they have a good amount of time to post then they don't need good lenses. Or even sharp. I find that a big benefit of having a good lens cuts down on workflow by a huge amount. Especially when you've got photos to deliver in a timely manner.

Click to expand...

Photoshop is nice, but it can't create detail information.

Dervast said:

Dear all,

I do not know that so I am just asking/guessing here.

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness e.t.c but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Give me your thoughts and ideas here.

Regards

Alex

Click to expand...

There are a few fundamental differences in the design for lenses that were designed for film and more recent lenses that have been designed for use with digital sensors.

1. Digital sensors are much more reflective than most films ever were. Therefore light being reflected back into the camera / lens can be a greater problem with digital causing lower contrast and flare in extreme cases. 'Digital' lenses therefore tend to be designed with more attention to flare blocking measures, including light traps and a rear element that has an outer curvature designed to stop light being transmitted back into the lens.
2. Photosites at the edges of a digital sensor are often not very efficient at receiving light that strikes the sensor at extreme angles which can result in colour fringing. Film was far less sensitive to this although of course vignetting could still be a problem. So with 'digital' lenses one of the design objectives is to make the light rays striking the sensor as close to parallel as possible. Hard to do with extreme wide angles.
3. The resolution of film was less so the demands on lenses designed for film were less severe. One practical aspect is that the apparent depth of field with digital can seem to be less. It isn't really but the circle of confusion used to calculate depth of field should perhaps be revised for digital cameras. For example the generally accepted CoC for 35mm film was 0.03mm and this is also still used in many cases for Full Frame digital. Perhaps it should be revised to 0.015mm, especially for high resolution cameras.

scorrpio said:

ambercool said:

If someone is pretty good at Photoshop and they have a good amount of time to post then they don't need good lenses. Or even sharp. I find that a big benefit of having a good lens cuts down on workflow by a huge amount. Especially when you've got photos to deliver in a timely manner.

Click to expand...

Photoshop is nice, but it can't create detail information.

Click to expand...

True to that. What I like about this era is how much confirmation we can find of lenses and their performance. There's no need to make an uninformed choice.

Hi,

very good comments from everyone so thanks a lot for the feedback. I still what is missing though is how you should read the reviews.

A review might test the A,B,C and D of a lens which of these metrics can

a. be biased from objective views

b. which are the most important (thus not that correctable from post processing profiles). I expect that some to be more severe. I can think my self (not sure is true) is that if you have very high vignett and at the cross of the frame you have shadows that you need detail too this vignettin can just wipe information from there, that otherwise would be recorded.

Keep replying

Alex

Dervast said:

Hi,

very good comments from everyone so thanks a lot for the feedback. I still what is missing though is how you should read the reviews.

A review might test the A,B,C and D of a lens which of these metrics can

a. be biased from objective views

b. which are the most important (thus not that correctable from post processing profiles). I expect that some to be more severe. I can think my self (not sure is true) is that if you have very high vignett and at the cross of the frame you have shadows that you need detail too this vignettin can just wipe information from there, that otherwise would be recorded.

Keep replying

Alex

Click to expand...

Yes - this is very good observation. Everyone tends to focus on reviews that award stars or points like DxO or PhotoZone.de. And those reviews try to boil the performance of a lens down to a few easily measurable parameters. That is important, but not always a predicator of the visual quality of the end result.

My favorite site is lenstip.com as they avoid making "five star" awards and the like and just discuss the lens and what it's doing. The parameters they use are the ones that make a significant difference and their charts make the most sense.

I also like to see what Roger Cicala at Lensrentals.com says about a lens as well as some of the other trusted bloggers. We are in a great time where we can get near real time reviews of a lens before it comes out to the public. This has pushed the quality curve way up since no manufacturer wants to be known as making a poor product.

Dervast said:

Dear all,

I do not know that so I am just asking/guessing here.

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

Click to expand...

Most are excellent. It's not hard to beat the zooms of yesterday and many of the primes as well, though some of the old lenses were great and have no equivalent today.

Dervast said:

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected.

Click to expand...

Depends on your standards. If you're choosing 24MP APS-C or 36MP FF specifically to make big prints, then you probably care.

Dervast said:

I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness e.t.c but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Click to expand...

Reliance on PP just bothers me. It doesn't matter if the end result is indistinguishable. Just like some people feel better driving a quality car to work than a clunker that gets the job done. I feel better knowing that the image that the sensor sees is as good as possible (given my requirements and my budget - we're all looking for the best compromise).

- Dennis
--
Gallery at http://kingofthebeasts.smugmug.com

But best affordable we get are made of brass.

Very common are low quality plastic lenses with plastic lens shade.

Dervast said:

Dear all,

I do not know that so I am just asking/guessing here.

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

Click to expand...

The wide angle and longer tele lenses have improved the most over those times. Normal lenses and short tele lenses much less, and some older lens can be very good still.

Dervast said:

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

Click to expand...

Laterral chromatic aberration is very well fixable issue. Different image distortions can be fixed well, albeit with very slight loss of image quality. Lacking sharpness or micro contrast can be improved somewhat with deconvolution and simple unharp masking.

Dervast said:

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness e.t.c but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Click to expand...

It is always better to have high quality information to start with, thus better quality image drawn by the lens, than to try to fix the problem which wouldn't exist with better lens.

FYI, I still use some old m42-mount lenses and they're perfectly fine, especially since I rarely print very very large.

Dervast said:

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

Click to expand...

The best modern lenses are probably as good or better optically and (as explained elsewhere) better for use with the reflective sensors of digital cameras. There are, though, plenty of cheap modern lenses that are adequate for a lot of purposes but not as good as the best old lenses (and, of course, there were plenty of poor lenses in the 80s).

Dervast said:

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

Click to expand...

Correcting things in PP means averaging information from a number of adjacent pixels. For aberrations and distortion this inevitably reduces resolution and contrast; for fall-off it inevitably increases noise.

The better the basic image the lower the loss, so other things being equal it's better to start with a good lens.

Dervast said:

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

Click to expand...

The things I've mentioned can be fixed to the extent that they are not visible in themselves, but with the losses I've mentioned. I'm not aware of any PP fixes for things like coma and astigmatism. (If there are such fixes I'd like to be able to use them).

Dervast said:

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness etc. but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Click to expand...

What we call sharpness is the combined result of (high) resolution and contrast. The ability to mark crisp transitions between dark and light is an aspect of contrast called acutance. PP can never increase resolution: if the lens resolves poorly that's it. PP can increase acutance but good lenses give better acutance (it's one of the things that makes lenses good). So whatever your PP skills, you can always get a sharper result starting from an image with a high-resolution good lens.

Lenses have characteristics that aren't amenable to measurement, so most test sites give an incomplete picture of what a lens can achieve. But for the things that an be measured it's always worth looking at the good test sites. That's always been the case: I remember being puzzled by test measurements in Dad's camera magazines in the 1950s. Testing lenses isn't new. It was important (but not the whole story) then; it's important (but not the whole story) now.

From 1954 (he may not have been reading lens tests)





--
---
Gerry
_______________________________________
First camera 1953, first Pentax 1985, first DSLR 2006
[email protected]

Gerry Winterbourne said:

Dervast said:

1. How good our lenses compared to the old minolta lenses we had back at the 80s?

Click to expand...

The best modern lenses are probably as good or better optically and (as explained elsewhere) better for use with the reflective sensors of digital cameras. There are, though, plenty of cheap modern lenses that are adequate for a lot of purposes but not as good as the best old lenses (and, of course, there were plenty of poor lenses in the 80s).

Gerry Winterbourne said:

2. I find that is great feature that some of the optical problems of todays lenses can be corrected from Lightroom (and other programs) via the available profiles.

Click to expand...

Correcting things in PP means averaging information from a number of adjacent pixels. For aberrations and distortion this inevitably reduces resolution and contrast; for fall-off it inevitably increases noise.

The better the basic image the lower the loss, so other things being equal it's better to start with a good lens.

Gerry Winterbourne said:

3. which bring me in the third question... How many problems we can fix and in how good level todays optics through post processing?

Click to expand...

The things I've mentioned can be fixed to the extent that they are not visible in themselves, but with the losses I've mentioned. I'm not aware of any PP fixes for things like coma and astigmatism. (If there are such fixes I'd like to be able to use them).

Gerry Winterbourne said:

4. Should we care much today about review when buying lenses or should we feel rested (or more rested compared to the 80s) that most problem can be corrected. I see many people spending days checking lenses for sharpness etc. but I wonder if it is less important today since we can correct thinks in post processing.

Click to expand...

What we call sharpness is the combined result of (high) resolution and contrast. The ability to mark crisp transitions between dark and light is an aspect of contrast called acutance. PP can never increase resolution: if the lens resolves poorly that's it. PP can increase acutance but good lenses give better acutance (it's one of the things that makes lenses good). So whatever your PP skills, you can always get a sharper result starting from an image with a high-resolution good lens.

Click to expand...

But there's also CAs and coma which contribute to the perception of sharpness. I'll take a lens with decent sharpness but low CA and good contrast over one that is sharper but has worse fringing.

scorrpio said:

ambercool said:

If someone is pretty good at Photoshop and they have a good amount of time to post then they don't need good lenses. Or even sharp. I find that a big benefit of having a good lens cuts down on workflow by a huge amount. Especially when you've got photos to deliver in a timely manner.

Click to expand...

Photoshop is nice, but it can't create detail information.

Click to expand...

A "good" Photoshop user might not be able to, but the advanced/expert can detail just about anything; albeit making pixels up. But that's another debate for what's real and what's not.

Sugasmune said:

But best affordable we get are made of brass.

Very common are low quality plastic lenses with plastic lens shade.

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I guess you mean the non-optical hardware; light don't go through titanium very well. But a titanium lens mount would be a real horror. Have you ever tried to put threads in titanium? Gummiest stuff in the world.

I had some brass-mounted lenses. Very heavy. I'm pretty happy with aluminum and am getting to tolerate plastic.

ambercool said:

scorrpio said:

ambercool said:

If someone is pretty good at Photoshop and they have a good amount of time to post then they don't need good lenses. Or even sharp. I find that a big benefit of having a good lens cuts down on workflow by a huge amount. Especially when you've got photos to deliver in a timely manner.

Click to expand...

Photoshop is nice, but it can't create detail information.

Click to expand...

A "good" Photoshop user might not be able to, but the advanced/expert can detail just about anything; albeit making pixels up. But that's another debate for what's real and what's not.

Click to expand...

Not really - not in the way he's implying. I mean, why bother at that point?

There is a sporting aspect to getting the shot to be as good as possible before beginning post processing. Hence, the better the lens, the more satisfying the result will be.

Sugasmune said:

But best affordable we get are made of brass.

Very common are low quality plastic lenses with plastic lens shade.

Click to expand...

Why? Any extra money spent on the lens should be for better optics, yes?