Re: Friday rant: The future of Canon RF and 3rd party lenses
Robert Krawitz wrote:
John Photo wrote:
Sittatunga wrote:
John Photo wrote:
"Canon is making constant firmware changes to RF lenses and bodies, good luck with your third party cheaper obsession"
Canon seems to use software (and firmware) "enhancements to their lenses rather than build lenses with good optics, as they did in the past. For a wide-zoom lens that I would occasionally use, I am not going to spend $1800 for decent IQ, nor am I likely to spend $600 on the RF15-30 f/4.5-6.3 with its poor IQ even after Canon tries to manipulate images with less than satisfactory software corrections. The weak optics in their $1000 lenses without their manipulation software could never stand on their own optics.
(I know; for instance, the RF100-400, which I own, produces good results, but again that is largely due to corrections rather than great optics).
I find that post processing corrections make very little difference to my results from this lens. What improvements do you find find coming from the software?
As mentioned, I do not have this lens, but reading numerous reviews (including The Digital Picture, Ken Rockwell, and more), if all possible corrections in-camera and/or DPP are turned off (distortion cannot be turned off at least in-camera for this lens), the actual results from the lenses optics are pretty poor. Nothing of which you are not already aware.
Is it the lens that matters, or the result? If computation can easily and transparently correct the result, especially in-camera (I use Linux and can't easily run DPP), then the question to me is why should I care about component performance vs. system performance?
IF the price reflects the optical performance straight from the glass, then you should not care. IMO the 16/2.8 for example should be dirt cheap. Otherwise Canon (and I am sure others will follow) will get fat&lazy in the lab, slam an algorithm on it in post and call it day.
But then again, Canons high-end glass is so darn expensive now so I guess this is the unavoidable work-around.