Roger Krueger
Veteran Member
It's always been there, but people printed 12x18 off their 35mm once in a blue moon. Now everyone goes to 100% in Photoshop on nearly every "keeper" and sees the emperor's new clothes.
The angle-of-incidence-makes-it-soft BS is just that, BS. On an SLR the angle of incidence maxes out at about 28mm--they have to stop getting closer to miss the mirror--past that the lenses just keep getting more and more retrofocus. Which does mean softer corners, but blame it on retrofocus SLR designs, not digital.
With individual microlenses you're not going to have resolution killing problems anyway. What you will get is vignetting, but that's not related to softness. Even here it's not all the sensors fault, wide lenses naturally have some falloff.
The absolute worst case out there for angle of incidence---the 12mm Voigtlander on the Epson RD-1--hasn't been reported as having sharpness issues in the corners. It does have a problem with vignetting, but this is a lens that needed a center filter on FF anyway. Taking it digital only made the issue worse.
It's not like you need to "design for digital" to get sharp wide corners on FF--my Leica 19/2.8 has glorious corners. You just have to care about it when you design the lens. Canon/Nikon/etc. couldn't afford the luxury of fixing something no one would notice when designing $400 wide primes (and I'm pretty sure ALL their wide primes are pre-digital designs). Leica and Contax, working with 5-7 times the money (and no AF) could afford the extra elements and tighter tolerances necessary to get it right.
Retrofocus ultrawides? This is just a hard, hard, hard thing to do. Canon's $1700 14/2.8 is mediocre, and is better than most of the competition, on film or digital. Leica's 15/2.8 appears to be the sole standout, but for $7k, yeah, you'd expect they did whatever they had to to get it right. It's worth noting that Leica teamed with Schneider to do the 15/2.8 because they were very dissatisfied with the 15/3.5 they were sourcing from Zeiss, and even that was both much better and much more expensive than the Canon. But take away the retrofocus requirement, and my Voigtlander 12mm for $500 is wider and at least as sharp in the corners. The 16/8 Contax Hologon for the G2 is miles ahead.
The angle-of-incidence-makes-it-soft BS is just that, BS. On an SLR the angle of incidence maxes out at about 28mm--they have to stop getting closer to miss the mirror--past that the lenses just keep getting more and more retrofocus. Which does mean softer corners, but blame it on retrofocus SLR designs, not digital.
With individual microlenses you're not going to have resolution killing problems anyway. What you will get is vignetting, but that's not related to softness. Even here it's not all the sensors fault, wide lenses naturally have some falloff.
The absolute worst case out there for angle of incidence---the 12mm Voigtlander on the Epson RD-1--hasn't been reported as having sharpness issues in the corners. It does have a problem with vignetting, but this is a lens that needed a center filter on FF anyway. Taking it digital only made the issue worse.
It's not like you need to "design for digital" to get sharp wide corners on FF--my Leica 19/2.8 has glorious corners. You just have to care about it when you design the lens. Canon/Nikon/etc. couldn't afford the luxury of fixing something no one would notice when designing $400 wide primes (and I'm pretty sure ALL their wide primes are pre-digital designs). Leica and Contax, working with 5-7 times the money (and no AF) could afford the extra elements and tighter tolerances necessary to get it right.
Retrofocus ultrawides? This is just a hard, hard, hard thing to do. Canon's $1700 14/2.8 is mediocre, and is better than most of the competition, on film or digital. Leica's 15/2.8 appears to be the sole standout, but for $7k, yeah, you'd expect they did whatever they had to to get it right. It's worth noting that Leica teamed with Schneider to do the 15/2.8 because they were very dissatisfied with the 15/3.5 they were sourcing from Zeiss, and even that was both much better and much more expensive than the Canon. But take away the retrofocus requirement, and my Voigtlander 12mm for $500 is wider and at least as sharp in the corners. The 16/8 Contax Hologon for the G2 is miles ahead.
