anotherMike
Forum Pro
Probably my last post before the forum blackout/switch, but...
Let's talk about the 105/1.4E
It's the third lens in a progression of lenses designer Haruo Sato was involved with that embodied his concepts about rendering of real objects in photographs. He did some initial work on the 105E but the design is another designer (whose name escapes me as I scribe this). Anyway, per a recent interview with him, his thesis in college was about rendering realism and what he calls "3D hifi" or something - and without getting deep, it's about designing where there are choices that maximize MTF in a purely technical sense, but those approaches lead to a reduction in the rendering he was going after. This makes sense when you think that MTF of a single focus point is all about flat objects. I'm simplifying greatly here of course. He wasn't the only one. Ex pentax designer Jun Hirakawa also believed in this - and there is some writing from him out on the web where he talks about it - there are aspects of a design where you might purposefully "stray" from what will give you best test chart/MTF performance in order to gain rendering. I'm sure those two were not the only ones. We should note that Nikon (and probably a couple of other major players) created a lens evaluation system where they could pre-visualize the output in terms of rendering - going beyond just the MTF, spot diagrams and aberration charts any modern lens design software can produce. So they definitely know what they are going with the design; none of this by accident. I'm pretty sure none of those guys gives much of a thought to some MTF50 score. And the more you research MTF scores or even MTF itself, you'll find there's a ton of intersecting aspects that determine image quality - and it's a long, long way from a single MTF50 score on some test site of a chart at some distance. It's so complicated it's almost impossible to describe well and I've been looking at lens performance evaluation for the better part of 10 years now and I'm still learning to this day. I believe in a youtube interview by Matt Granger (who didn't do a great job in this one) of the late/great Hubert Nasse of Zeiss, Nasse was exasperated when asked what was important or something (it's late and I'm doing poor justice to this topic, my apologies) and Hubert replied "It's everything". His whitepapers on MTF are difficult but critical reading if one is to get beyond this obsession of MTF50 test site scores, as well as researching Otto Schade and his image quality experiments and theories on MTF done in the 40's for RCA.
Back to Sato again - in interviews about his second lens in the progression of his concepts (the 35/1.4G was his first), the 58/1.4G he designed, he specifically mentioned trading away some high spatial frequency performance to gain other aspects of image quality, particularly OOF behavior. This lens of course is controversial - my feeling is the magnitude of his trades were too much in the D800E and later era, which led to a lens that didn't render fine detail like hair, textural fabrics well, but others, often who shot lower megapixel bodies the lens was seemingly designed to match, absolutely fell in love.
Back to the 105: Sato has mentioned that with the 105E they utilized the same concepts but changed the tuning a bit to include more sharpness. Yet at the end of the day, they ended up with a lens with excellent rendering, very good sharpness, that everyone who has owned or used one, myself included, loved. At the same time or so, Sigma came out with the huge 105/1.4 Art. Sharper wide open: check, a bit sharper? check, but it didn't render *anywhere* like the 105E did - I've shot both, and was a huge, almost pathetically an addict, of Sigma Art glass during those days, so I was fulling expecting to get on the 105/1.4 Art train, yet I chose the 105E. It simply was the better lens for people, which is most of what I use a 105 for. I ended up selling it because I preferred the output from the 85/1.2S and knew as great as the 105E is, that I wouldn't be using it going forward with the 85/1.2S in my kit.
So this concept of the design and what the designer wants to do with it, even if it means not winning a test chart battle, has been around. Unfortunately, in a world where so many bow down the prayer mat to test chart numbers, some manufacturers go for winning those battles. Easier for the camera store guy to say "buy this lens, it tested 'the best' in a 30 sharpest lenses (or whatever) video". What should be happening is that we talk about these things - it's not that a tuned or un-tuned lens is good or bad, but that a buyer be aware of the behavior, along with understanding that just because a lens is tuned a bit towards portraiture, that it's not "OMG this his horrible " - the forum behavior tends to magnify greatness beyond reality and also magnify anything that isn't greatness the other direction, and then use this information to make a *good* purchase decision.
So the best of the Z lenses, and I do feel it's the 35/1.2S, 85/1.2S, Plena, and the 50/1.2S just slightly behind those guys (outside of the exotics of course), actually continue the thinking behind the 105E, but with a much sharper result. Nikon these days understands that high resolution bodies demand a certain level of resolution to work, but at the same time, *are* willing to against the proverbial grain and introduce a lens that renders better than it tests to a slight extent, and then we get these kind of posts. It not about one approach being better than another; it's about matching tool to task and preference, while getting past both the overly positive and overly negative "talk" we often see. And of course, I tend to listen to people who actually have owned or shot the lenses they talk about and ignore those who have not.
Well, that's it for my last post in the threaded forums. I'll miss em!
Let's talk about the 105/1.4E
It's the third lens in a progression of lenses designer Haruo Sato was involved with that embodied his concepts about rendering of real objects in photographs. He did some initial work on the 105E but the design is another designer (whose name escapes me as I scribe this). Anyway, per a recent interview with him, his thesis in college was about rendering realism and what he calls "3D hifi" or something - and without getting deep, it's about designing where there are choices that maximize MTF in a purely technical sense, but those approaches lead to a reduction in the rendering he was going after. This makes sense when you think that MTF of a single focus point is all about flat objects. I'm simplifying greatly here of course. He wasn't the only one. Ex pentax designer Jun Hirakawa also believed in this - and there is some writing from him out on the web where he talks about it - there are aspects of a design where you might purposefully "stray" from what will give you best test chart/MTF performance in order to gain rendering. I'm sure those two were not the only ones. We should note that Nikon (and probably a couple of other major players) created a lens evaluation system where they could pre-visualize the output in terms of rendering - going beyond just the MTF, spot diagrams and aberration charts any modern lens design software can produce. So they definitely know what they are going with the design; none of this by accident. I'm pretty sure none of those guys gives much of a thought to some MTF50 score. And the more you research MTF scores or even MTF itself, you'll find there's a ton of intersecting aspects that determine image quality - and it's a long, long way from a single MTF50 score on some test site of a chart at some distance. It's so complicated it's almost impossible to describe well and I've been looking at lens performance evaluation for the better part of 10 years now and I'm still learning to this day. I believe in a youtube interview by Matt Granger (who didn't do a great job in this one) of the late/great Hubert Nasse of Zeiss, Nasse was exasperated when asked what was important or something (it's late and I'm doing poor justice to this topic, my apologies) and Hubert replied "It's everything". His whitepapers on MTF are difficult but critical reading if one is to get beyond this obsession of MTF50 test site scores, as well as researching Otto Schade and his image quality experiments and theories on MTF done in the 40's for RCA.
Back to Sato again - in interviews about his second lens in the progression of his concepts (the 35/1.4G was his first), the 58/1.4G he designed, he specifically mentioned trading away some high spatial frequency performance to gain other aspects of image quality, particularly OOF behavior. This lens of course is controversial - my feeling is the magnitude of his trades were too much in the D800E and later era, which led to a lens that didn't render fine detail like hair, textural fabrics well, but others, often who shot lower megapixel bodies the lens was seemingly designed to match, absolutely fell in love.
Back to the 105: Sato has mentioned that with the 105E they utilized the same concepts but changed the tuning a bit to include more sharpness. Yet at the end of the day, they ended up with a lens with excellent rendering, very good sharpness, that everyone who has owned or used one, myself included, loved. At the same time or so, Sigma came out with the huge 105/1.4 Art. Sharper wide open: check, a bit sharper? check, but it didn't render *anywhere* like the 105E did - I've shot both, and was a huge, almost pathetically an addict, of Sigma Art glass during those days, so I was fulling expecting to get on the 105/1.4 Art train, yet I chose the 105E. It simply was the better lens for people, which is most of what I use a 105 for. I ended up selling it because I preferred the output from the 85/1.2S and knew as great as the 105E is, that I wouldn't be using it going forward with the 85/1.2S in my kit.
So this concept of the design and what the designer wants to do with it, even if it means not winning a test chart battle, has been around. Unfortunately, in a world where so many bow down the prayer mat to test chart numbers, some manufacturers go for winning those battles. Easier for the camera store guy to say "buy this lens, it tested 'the best' in a 30 sharpest lenses (or whatever) video". What should be happening is that we talk about these things - it's not that a tuned or un-tuned lens is good or bad, but that a buyer be aware of the behavior, along with understanding that just because a lens is tuned a bit towards portraiture, that it's not "OMG this his horrible " - the forum behavior tends to magnify greatness beyond reality and also magnify anything that isn't greatness the other direction, and then use this information to make a *good* purchase decision.
So the best of the Z lenses, and I do feel it's the 35/1.2S, 85/1.2S, Plena, and the 50/1.2S just slightly behind those guys (outside of the exotics of course), actually continue the thinking behind the 105E, but with a much sharper result. Nikon these days understands that high resolution bodies demand a certain level of resolution to work, but at the same time, *are* willing to against the proverbial grain and introduce a lens that renders better than it tests to a slight extent, and then we get these kind of posts. It not about one approach being better than another; it's about matching tool to task and preference, while getting past both the overly positive and overly negative "talk" we often see. And of course, I tend to listen to people who actually have owned or shot the lenses they talk about and ignore those who have not.
Well, that's it for my last post in the threaded forums. I'll miss em!
Last edited:
