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What is your aperture's "sweet spot"?

Started 5 months ago | Discussions thread
Dunlin Senior Member • Posts: 2,611
Re: What is your aperture's "sweet spot"?

Iron Mike wrote:

stevet1 wrote:

Do you have one?

What aperture do you think gives you your sharpest pictures?

I don't think there is any right or wrong answer to this question. Does it vary by camera or lens?

I've read that it's usually about 2 or 3 stops down from a lens's widest aperture, but I don't know for sure.

Steve Thomas

There are review websites that show the image sharpness of a lens (measured by imatest) across its field of view for different apertures. The performance will vary for different lenses, some high end optics can be at maximal sharpness (centre) wide open or even 1 stop down. Often the edges of the image circle will improve at smaller apertures, even after the centre is already past its maximal resolution (or losing sharpens due to diffraction). The performance of zoom lenses can vary depending on the focal length. The review sites https://www.imaging-resource.com/ and https://www.photozone.de both display this sort of data for a wide number of canon lenses.

Mike

Don't forget copy variance.

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