[HN Gopher] Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?
Author : giuliomagnifico
Score : 277 points
Date : 2021-05-10 09:39 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.dpreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.dpreview.com)
| hahamrfunnyguy wrote:
| I have the Canon 50mm/f1.8 aka the "Nifty Fifty". Got it a few
| years ago when it was still under $100. At the time, it was the
| cheapest prime lens you could but. I really like the photos I get
| with that lens.
| w0mbat wrote:
| That cheap Canon 50mm lens is great. I use a Canon 5D mk
| something and carry a 28mm, a 50mm, and a 100mm, all of them
| f/2.0 or 1.8.
|
| For a lot of shots I want the specific look of f/2.0 on a
| decent prime lens. I don't actually want an aperture wider than
| that.
| dmalvarado wrote:
| It took me a long time but I finally got over the never-ending
| desire for ever sharper lenses. 50mm is a general purpose lens.
| Not like macro or super-telephoto. Sharp enough to get the gist
| of the image without being distractingly blurry is good enough.
| amelius wrote:
| How are these lens systems designed? Do they use "black box"
| optimization methods like gradient descent, simulated annealing
| or even genetic algorithms to find the optimal configuration of
| lenses?
| mateo1 wrote:
| There's no point in using such methods as the physics
| surrounding optics aren't a black box, they're well-known and
| understood. However lens design is very complicated, there are
| dozens of design parameters and trade-offs to be made, while
| also taking in account time, cost, materials etc. It's also not
| a problem that can be solved analytically for realistic use
| cases.
|
| Computer ray tracing has been used for decades. I'm not sure
| what the state of the art tools are however.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| How it used to be done:
| https://imaging.nikon.com/history/story/
|
| Super-experienced people backed up by a small army of people
| doing ray-tracing by hand.
|
| Wikipedia might give you starting points to find modern
| answers:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_lens_design#Lens_optim...
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_photographic_lens_d...
|
| And if you want to get a general feel for how the modern
| designs work, Bill Claffs optical bench is a nice starting
| point:
| https://www.photonstophotos.net/GeneralTopics/Lenses/Optical...
|
| (tbh it sounds a lot like the EDA space, and CAE in general)
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah, modern lenses are definitely computer-designed but if
| there's any ML being used, it's almost certainly _very_
| recent.
| ajross wrote:
| What _I_ don 't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which
| are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive
| market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course
| they're going to be overdesigned.
|
| What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible
| convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy
| in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is
| already lossy: pixel boundaries, spectrum of the color sensors,
| etc... all have straightforward analogs in both space and
| frequency domain.
|
| Basically: why hasn't someone come out with a camera with a junky
| single-piece lens and a fancy image processing backend and won
| the market?
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| There are "Light field cameras" that try to capture lightfields
| / light flux. However, their ray angular resolution isn't
| anywhere enough to really do too much fun stuff.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| There are also single-pixel compressive sensing cameras,
| which don't need focusing optics at all, so they can be made
| lensless (and potentially flat). They also have plenty of
| downsides though, such as poor performance in scenes with
| movement, or very high computational requirements for image
| reconstruction.
| sparsely wrote:
| Lots of m43 cameras do some of the corrections in software,
| which does keep lens sizes and prices down.
| tachion wrote:
| But of course they have - every major smartphone manufacturer
| is eating the whole consumer camera market alive for quite few
| years now.
| mellavora wrote:
| yes, but perhaps this is because of other things? Like that a
| person is going to have their phone with them anyway? Even if
| a phone camera is only 1/2 as good as a consumer camera, the
| ease of use and convenience is going to win the 99% of the
| market which doesn't care about 'professional grade' results.
| And the 1% that does care is going to buy a SLR.
|
| Not better tech (better as in takes better photos), rather
| more convenient tech which is good enough.
| packetlost wrote:
| Good enough for most people's point-and-shoot, but a
| smartphone camera is by no means competitive for anything
| beyond that. Hobby photography is fairly common too, and
| most people won't be using smartphones for that.
| Miraste wrote:
| Nobody has done this with a full frame sensor, as far as I
| know. I'd be interested to see smartphone image processing
| with a sensor that size.
| tachion wrote:
| There is fairly new Zeiss camera that implemented the whole
| "camera OS" with Android and even included mobile Lightroom
| editing capabilities. I guess it's as close as it gets
| right now. My theory is that the main Japanese companies
| are extremely conservative and they don't pick up such
| changes easily - see how Canon and Nikon completely missed
| mirrorless and suffered huge market loss to Sony.
| gerikson wrote:
| Nikon made a mirrorless camera series (Nikon 1) that was
| very capable (the on-sensor AF was great). But they chose
| a 1" sensor (2.7x crop)
|
| Canon's M-series was similar, they didn't go all in on
| "pro" features, instead focussed on a consumer market
| that was shrinking rapidly.
|
| The problem wasn't the technology, the problem was the
| fear of cannibalizing their own DSLR sales.
| meowzero wrote:
| Most image processing has to do with imitating full frame
| sensors (better low light photography, DOF, etc.) So I'm
| not sure if full frame/APSC/Med-format cameras need the
| same image processing that camera phones have. Also, most
| people who use the bigger sensor cameras are probably pros.
| Most of them would prefer a "blank slate" and use RAWs.
| astrange wrote:
| Camera phones have significantly better processing than
| newer full frame cameras at this point; obviously they
| can't take the same pictures, but full frame cameras
| can't do HDR, noise stacking, night mode etc very well.
| You can do it by hand by shooting raws and editing them
| together but it's inconvenient. The autofocus is also
| more advanced in iPhones with lidar.
|
| I assume part of this is that the camera companies are
| Japanese and refuse to pay any engineers more than $20k a
| year.
| jeffbee wrote:
| My Olympus does in-body HDR, noise reduction with
| stacking, low-light handheld with sensor stabilization,
| and more. It's not "full-frame" but full-frame is a
| meaningless condescension from the 35mm crowd.
| Saris wrote:
| That's basically what micro 4/3 cameras are doing. As far as I
| know they all can do distortion correction in-camera for JPEG
| output, and the prime lenses are generally quite cheap and very
| compact.
|
| For example Panasonic has a 25mm f/1.7 lens that is 125 grams
| and costs $150 brand new.
|
| Of course you can also buy similar focal length lenses that are
| huge and weigh over a pound, while spending $1500+. But I don't
| know how much advantage those really give except in specific
| rare situations.
| dharma1 wrote:
| I like m43 cameras, but the depth of field with that sensor
| size is nowhere near that of full frame
| sudosysgen wrote:
| I disagree. The Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 is equivalent to a 50mm
| f3.4 on full frame.
|
| For 150g on full-frame you can get a 50mm _1.8_ , at a cost
| of 150$ brand new. So on full frame at a similar weight and
| at the same price you get superior optics.
|
| If you really care about the weight, the 40mm 2.8 has the
| same weight and the same price but superior optics again.
|
| All modern FF cameras do distortion correction too. M4/3
| lenses are not especially decided to trade-off distortion for
| sharpness anymore than full-frame.
| ddulaney wrote:
| I would argue that this happened with smartphones. "Real"
| cameras are generally for people who want to chase that optical
| precision, but for people who are satisfied with a good-enough
| post-processing solution will generally be satisfied with their
| phones.
| EveYoung wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what modern smartphones are doing? I think
| it's quite impressive what Apple and Google are able to do with
| clever image processing.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What GCam does is simple stacking to improve snr plus some
| clever alignment/de-ghosting to avoid motion artifacts. It
| mostly compensates for the sensor size, not the lens
| simplicity. They still have many artifacts which big lenses
| don't, even after software compensation calibrated to match
| the specific camera.
| [deleted]
| c0nfused wrote:
| I think that market is largely already consumed by phones. For
| most people, there is no reason to not just use a phone to take
| picutres.
|
| Once you are in the 2k$ usd lens space the buyer is looking for
| ultra premium stuff either as an enthusiast buyer or as some
| one who makes their living that way.
| proudfoot wrote:
| You're not capturing the rays, you only get where they strike.
| You can't fix it all computationally.
|
| Secondly, we already do correct distortion and chromatic
| aberration in software, but this doesn't really make up for
| loss of resolution that you can't fix. Information is being
| lost.
| crazygringo wrote:
| > _You can 't fix it all computationally._
|
| Can't you? If you're dealing with known hardware, then you
| can apply a deconvolution. Blurring can literally be undone,
| people do it all the time. It's harder when you have to
| estimate the kernel, but much easier when you already know
| the lens's exact properties. Also when you apply it directly
| to RAW data.
|
| So not exactly sure which information you're referring to you
| when say information is being lost?
|
| Sure artifacts can be introduced from noise, etc., but that's
| all just tradeoffs. If a simpler lens is letting in more
| light, or you put money towards the sensor rather than the
| lens, the end result may well be better, no?
| karmakaze wrote:
| I think you might be able to do a good job if you had a
| depth map of the image. You could use ML to guess them.
| Computation without that treats incident angles that vary
| by the distance ratios as the same.
| 91aintprime wrote:
| Some blurring is like pixelization
| proudfoot wrote:
| You don't have the exact kernel, if you're even slightly
| wrong you can end off being worse off. You'll have very
| significant variation in lower quality optics.
|
| And there's a variety of sharpening tools that claim to do
| this! DxO is a company that sells a raw processor for
| precisely this purpose. People still buy better lenses.
| hatsunearu wrote:
| If you have depth information blurring can be undone
| theoretically, but you don't.
| ajross wrote:
| That's the point though: the quantization absolutely
| introduces errors, but there were there to begin with. You're
| comparing the computed result of my "cheap camera" not with
| its competitor's sensor output but with the hypothetical
| _focal plane_ of the competitor 's lens. And that's wrong,
| because the competitor has pixels too.
|
| The error you get out is of the order of the sampling error
| you put in. That's true of all lenses.
| proudfoot wrote:
| I'm saying with the same sensor, the competition will have
| better data compared to you, since the rays are striking
| where they should be.
|
| Information is lost when a ray strikes somewhere it
| shouldn't. Things get blurred and cannot be recovered. You
| can't fix this with software.
| ticklemyelmo wrote:
| Isn't the location that a ray strikes entirely a function of
| angle of incidence, its frequency, and the particular lens?
| Why couldn't that function be determined and inverted?
| proudfoot wrote:
| Optimally yes. But in practice multiple rays from multiple
| angles strike the same sensor.
|
| Lens design is about minimizing this.
| Fronzie wrote:
| The phase matters as well if some parts are captured out of
| the focal plane.
|
| Even if reconstruction is possible, it might amplify the
| noise by a substantial amount.
| robotastronaut wrote:
| That market -- the one that would be happy with a mediocre lens
| and great image processing - likely overlaps with people using
| top tier mobile devices for their work. After all, acceptable
| lenses with amazing image processing is basically what the
| flagship iPhones and android devices bring to the table, and
| their use case tends to overlap with that of a 50mm prime.
| vagrantJin wrote:
| This strikes me as true.
|
| I wouldnt say the camera companies did not see this coming.
| They did and chose to not do anything about it. I shoot
| videos with some pretty low end DSLR cameras and they are
| often lacking the feautures of any modern flagship phone.
| It's a joke. We once used a whole Iphone shooting at 120fps
| and made some plain scenes look amazing in post. A revelation
| since most pro videographers pooh pooh phone cameras without
| realizing that they are growing with alarming speed.
| cartoonfoxes wrote:
| The pros are well aware of the gains made by phone cameras.
| Sensors and pixels aren't the primary factor for choosing
| say, a $10,000 camera, over an iPhone. Reliability, battery
| life, form factor, control ergonomics, lens compatibility,
| codecs, ease of integration with third-party equipment,
| standards compliance, and on it goes. I don't think the
| opinion is that an iPhone can't make a nice image, just
| that they are woefully insufficient for many needs for
| reasons other than the sensor and processing algorithms.
| gjm11 wrote:
| What a lens does is fully reversible _if you have phases as
| well as amplitudes at infinitely high resolution_.
|
| Unfortunately, you don't. You have a sensor that captures only
| amplitudes, on a spatially quantized grid, with some noise. It
| loses a lot of information. If your lens has very low
| aberration and not too much distortion, most of that
| information is information you don't care about. If your lens
| has a lot of aberration and distortion, a lot of the
| information you care about is encoded in exactly the stuff that
| the sensor is losing.
| _ph_ wrote:
| A junky single-piece lens won't do it, you can't correct
| everything in post-processing. Information that is lost is
| lost. But there are corrections which can be well made
| computationally, like lens distortion. As a consequence, there
| are several modern lenses which trade more distortion for
| general improved sharpness. The distortion then gets corrected
| digitally. As a consequence, you do get improved picture
| quality vs. what would have been possible in the same package
| otherwise.
| andromeduck wrote:
| You'd need a curved sensor to get a flat focal plane if that's
| what's desired. I personally don't quite get it either but
| rodgerd wrote:
| There are already manufacturers who do in-body correction
| alongside their lens design to get results that would require a
| ton more glass; Olympus are one. Sites like DPReview use it as
| a relentless talking point that those manufacturers are sub-par
| compared to the big advertisers.
|
| It's the photography equivalent of "if you were a real
| audiophile you'd only use pure analogue signals, digital
| destroys the sound".
| hatsunearu wrote:
| >What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible
| convolution.
|
| This is what I thought (it's not really convolution, but yes it
| is correctable), until I realized darktable/lensfun doesn't
| have lens profiles for any of my lenses... :(
| sega_sai wrote:
| You are not quite correct. The deconvolution only works well if
| you know exactly the convolution kernel and you have infinite
| signal to noise. In practice neither is true and you'll have
| artefacts if you try to do deconvolve. And the reason why it's
| hard to know exactly the convolution kernel is that it will
| depend on the wavelength of the photons, position in the focal
| plane and potentially orientation of the camera, if optical
| elements are moving around.
| hbosch wrote:
| I believe this was essentially the hope of "Lytro", or light-
| field cameras more generally.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light-field_camera
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| _why hasn 't someone come out with a camera with a junky
| single-piece lens and a fancy image processing backend and won
| the market?_
|
| I believe it's called the iPhone.
| astrange wrote:
| Doesn't do much of any lens compensation. It compensates for
| the sensor quality, but not the lens. There is portrait mode
| of course.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| Virtually every DSLR and mirrorless cameras will correct for
| distortion in camera. On Nikon it is called Auto Distortion
| Control, you can turn it on and off after the fact for raw
| images. Lightroom and most other photo developing software
| supports this as well, with profiles specific to each lens and
| focal length. Turning it on results in the image being cropped
| very slightly as a result of the image being "straightened out"
| in camera for Nikon, or with a slightly larger overall size
| otherwise. Besides that very noticeable change there are
| physical limits on what the software can do, a lens with less
| distortion will have more detail as a result
| hatsunearu wrote:
| >Basically: why hasn't someone come out with a camera with a
| junky single-piece lens and a fancy image processing backend
| and won the market?
|
| that's what phone cameras are...
|
| And a lot of lens aberrations not correctable robustly. LCA is
| basically impossible to correct, field curvature is impossible
| to correct, bokeh quality is impossible to correct (within
| reason), wide depth of field is impossible to correct, dynamic
| range is impossible to correct (without bracketing), coma is
| impossible to correct, flaring is impossible to correct and the
| list goes on.
| tzs wrote:
| Camera phones have had multi-element lenses for years,
| typically around six.
| lmilcin wrote:
| I have a bunch of full frame lenses.
|
| Recently I looked at some very old ones I haven't used in a long
| time. I thought they are faulty (soft).
|
| After some diagnosing I found that it is not the fault of lenses
| but rather in the meantime I have started looking at images at
| 1:1 in Lightroom and gotten used to ridiculously sharp images
| from new cameras.
|
| Have you ever watched an old TV show and despaired how
| unwatchable it is because of low quality of image? Yes, that's
| the same thing -- our tastes change.
| dheera wrote:
| Interestingly, I tried several modern Canon lenses about 8-10
| years ago and very quickly sold them because they were all not
| only producing subpar images compared to almost all my lenses
| from the 1960s-1980s, but they were also made of f-ing plastic
| and had an incredible amount of backlash in the rings.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Canon's L-series (red bands) have metal casings. The glass is
| also nicer, the barrels are rated much higher for
| dust/moisture protection. This is reflected in their much
| higher price tags.
| dheera wrote:
| I tried a couple L lenses and they were plastic, felt cheap
| as fuck, and horribly difficult to focus. Even tried a 50mm
| f/1.2 L and returned it within an hour of unboxing it. That
| thing, despite costing 3X as much, felt like a cheap toy in
| comparison to a Rokkor 58/1.2 or a Nikkor 50/1.2 (both of
| which are 1/3 of the price in perfect condition), and at
| the end of the day I still liked the rendition and hand
| feel of my Contax-Zeiss Planar 50/1.4 slightly better.
|
| I don't use autofocus, pretty much ever, so that isn't a
| consideration. But I do want quality precision mechanics,
| and I feel that shouldn't be much to ask for.
|
| My old lenses feel like quality scientific instruments, in
| comparison, and have long focus throws that allow me to
| focus very accurately.
|
| I now own a Canon body and zero Canon lenses except for an
| FD 300/2.8 that I modified to fit EF.
| ISL wrote:
| Many of the Ls are metal on the inside. A tough
| lightweight plastic shell can have major advantages
| (lighter, impact resistance, etc.)
|
| For a great example of a sharp modern L, check out the
| 16-35 f/4 IS. I'm not an ultra wide photographer by
| nature, but that lens impresses me each time it is
| called-upon.
|
| Choosing lenses, in the long run, is such a personal
| choice. My favorite first came to market in the early
| 1990s (and spent this morning with it) -- glad you have
| found good fits, too :).
| charrondev wrote:
| Yeah I've got a few of the L lenses and am impressed by
| them. I think the 50mm f/1.2 is particularly known for
| being soft though.
|
| 35mm f/1.4 - super sharp, great quality lens.
|
| 100-400 f/3.5-5.6 II - amazing lens. Very sharp and
| focuses very fast. I often use this with a canon
| multiplier as well for wildlife shots. For the price it's
| amazing.
|
| 16-35 f/4 IS - this is such a great landscape lens.
| dylan604 wrote:
| >and horribly difficult to focus. >I don't use autofocus,
| pretty much ever, so that isn't a consideration.
|
| But it is a consideration. Modern lenses are all designed
| for autofocus bodies. Yes, you can flip them into manual,
| but it is still a manual adjustment on a gear designed
| for computer control. A decent manual focus lens will
| typically have 270 degress of motion in the filter ring
| allowing much better control for humans. A autofocus lens
| typically only has 90 degress of motion (and then
| infinite turning drek). Much hard to get critical focus
| manually on an autofocus lens than a manual focus lens.
|
| Also, your older lenses probably weigh much more than the
| modern lenses. Lots of people prefer the lighter barrels.
|
| I do a fair bit of astrophotography, and the modern Canon
| glass is great for that. Crip, clean, and no need for
| focus once truly focused on infinity (varies on each
| lens, but typically "close" to where it is marked). The
| older lenses just don't have the sharpness.
|
| So there's a place for each of the older and newer lenses
| in my kit.
| dheera wrote:
| > I do a fair bit of astrophotography
|
| Interesting viewpoint! I do a lot of astrophotography and
| I found AF-capable lenses to just not work for me at all
| because a couple of shakes and some play in the gears
| would slop the lens out of focus, and the short throw and
| lack of infinity precision make it really hard.
|
| For astrophotography I just love being able to focus on a
| star and either calibrate the lens stop to be at
| infinity, or slap some gaffers tape and it's good for at
| least 2 months until the night temperature outside
| changes significantly.
|
| Of course, yes, sharpness is an issue for many older
| lenses, but the better ones of the 70s and 80s have very
| decent IQ. Honestly I just wish modern lens manufacturers
| would make more manual focus lenses. Laowa, Samyang, and
| Zeiss are all awesome for continuing that tradition.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Yes, I've always focused manually for astrophotography,
| and it always results in a series test images. Even using
| the live view at 10x, there is still room for improvement
| even though it is a good start. It's always a take pic,
| zoom all the way in on preview, and then make adjustments
| from there.
|
| I would buy an entire kit if they would release modern
| glass with 100% manual including aperture. There are
| places that will rehouse your lens so that it is full
| manual. The cost pretty much doubles the cost of the
| lens, but I have been tempted to do that for the 70-200.
| reader_mode wrote:
| >Have you ever watched an old TV show and despaired how
| unwatchable it is because of low quality of image? Yes, that's
| the same thing -- our tastes change.
|
| I've had the opposite reaction - I'd watch something I've seen
| before in 4k remastered or something and it would be a worse
| experience because the extra details reveal the low quality
| tricks you can get away with on lower reproduction quality.
| I've even noticed poor acting a lot more on higher def. It took
| away from immersion IMO.
| infofarmer wrote:
| Sweat. Beads of sweat on everyone. They were invisible at
| 720p and in cinematic projection, but 1080p and especially 4K
| remasters at close range at home reveal more about human skin
| than I cared to know.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| I don't know how true this is but I always found it
| interesting that new makeup was developed (HD foundation)
| as a result of the switch towards high definition tv/cinema
| formats.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There was also a resurgence in Soft F/X type filters
| until the Photoshop in a Can type of makeups came out.
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's 100% true. HD changed everything from the makeup to
| how sets are constructed, painted and lit. Even at the
| level of your local newscast.
| bostik wrote:
| Hah. I've had that experience but with sound.
|
| Long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and AMD K8 was
| the pinnacle of technology, I invested in a basic home
| theater setup. A decent AV receiver, a subwoofer, two studio-
| quality monitor speakers. A friend warned me that the
| speakers I had picked were "crisp, but unforgiving".
|
| All of a sudden DVDs sounded wonderful. The audio tracks in
| TV programmes became clear. The warnings made no sense.
|
| Until I watched a classic TV show episode from 1980's. Bad
| mixing. Flipped stereo channels. Stuffy voiceovers.
| Everything sounded ... _wrong_.
|
| Suddenly, it all made sense. I understood.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In images they call that the difference between being
| "scene referred" vs "display referred".
|
| There is no generally accepted theory of stereo sound,
| instead there are at least three theories:
| (1) a method for mastering sound recordings intended to be
| played by two speakers that are right next to each other
| (two sides of a TV, see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_Retrieval_System for
| some theory) (2) mastering sound records so
| that 'left means left' and 'right means right' which means
| your speakers are on opposite sides of the room and you're
| near the middle. That can cast sounds effectively to the
| left and right but falls down casting them to the middle
| (3) Ambisonics, which doesn't really work because the
| coherence in natural sound sources badly damages the timbre
| of natural sounds and the concept of 'represent natural
| soundfield' doesn't really mix with 'record instruments
| individually in dead environments', 'add reverb', and
| 'repeat' which is how 'quality' sound in the judgement of
| the industry is attained.
|
| One way to think about a 5.1 system with a modern layout
| (FL, FC, FR, R, and L, nothing in back) is that you put the
| FL and FR close to the FC, expect to play back type I
| content on the FL and FR, and play type 2 content on the L
| and R.
|
| Often DVDs were mixed under the assumption that they
| couldn't trust the receiver (e.g. no center channel); blu-
| rays sound a lot better not just because they allocate more
| bits to sound, but because the mixing is more aggressive...
| they don't feel they have to copy dialog on the L and the R
| because they know many people don't have a working C.
| m463 wrote:
| I think HDR can sometimes look ... different. Maybe it's like
| the early 3d stuff where you got weird motion artifacts until
| they figured it out.
|
| I watched Gemini Man in 4k HDR and some of the scenes seemed
| a little like a video game. I think there was sort of an
| "uncanny valley" sort of thing where you could see detail
| into the deepest shadow and it looked fake.
|
| On the other hand, 2001 in 4k was _awesome_.
| DavidVoid wrote:
| hbomberguy made a pretty decent video about this a few years
| ago [1]. From around the 10-minute mark he talks about how
| many horror/thriller films worked much better on VHS than
| they did in the cinema, because on VHS there weren't enough
| details to make out if there was a monster lurking in the
| background or not, and you also couldn't see how unrealistic
| the old cgi effects were.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xbZMqS-fW-8
| pier25 wrote:
| I'm a 4K HDR fanboy, but IMO most movies shot in 35mm film
| should remain in 1080p. 70mm film looks great in 4K though
| (2001, Nolan movies, etc).
|
| It's a shame there is no 1080p HDR content. 35mm movies would
| benefit a lot more of higher color bit depth that higher
| resolution. Anyone knows if this is a codec limitation?
| jaywalk wrote:
| 1080p HDR does exist (video games, mostly) but the lack of
| it is basically tied to the fact that there are no consumer
| TVs that can do HDR but not 4K.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I think 35mm->4k scans can look amazing. There's a lot
| going on though with film to digital scanning. The film
| stock itself has a lot to do with it. From the condition it
| has been stored as well as the actual type of film stock.
| The choice in a physical scanner also makes a difference.
| Single pass realtime captures vs slow speed triple flashed
| scans. Single pass is usually on a CMOS type sensor, where
| the triple flashes are typically on a CCD sensor. There's a
| whole list of things that are involved that makes one
| 35mm->4k transfer not like the next.
|
| Typically, you as a consumer, will be receiving an H.264 or
| H.265 stream that your cable box or streaming device
| decodes. These have all been updated with levels/profiles
| to allow for things like 3D, 4K, HDR, and 10bit encodes.
| The shoehorn used to shove new features into these formats
| has been put to heavy use.
| pier25 wrote:
| 35mm -> 4K can look amazing in terms of color, but I've
| yet to see a film where the added detail is not mostly
| film grain (exaggerated by sharpening). Do you have a
| good example?
| 4ad wrote:
| Not quite what you ask, but _very_ related:
| http://yedlin.net/ResDemo/
| pier25 wrote:
| This is awesome. Thanks for sharing.
| dylan604 wrote:
| This was the point of the type of film stock used. The
| film grain is why pretty much everyone will wince when
| you ask to do a 16mm->4K. Hell, 16mm->HD was rough.
|
| I don't have any examples on hand. But with large amount
| of time I have found myself with over the past year to
| watch a lot of content, I too have noticed even some of
| the last episodics to be shot on film (2005-2010 range)
| are very noticeable. I have also seen some features from
| the 90s that looked really clean in comparison. Lots of
| things go into that, from how much the camera department
| "cared", what film stock was used, what film processor
| was used, etc. Towards the end of mass film production,
| there were fewer and fewer labs left. During they heyday,
| the soups used in the processing where in constant use.
| As demand lowered, the soups kind of stagnated especially
| in the shops financially strapped.
|
| Film is fickle to be sure.
| pier25 wrote:
| Another point to consider is that many 4K 35mm movies,
| are actually upscaled from 1080p or 2K scans.
|
| Here's a good list to check whether a film is real 4K or
| not.
|
| https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-
| service/4K-UHD...
|
| I've now remembered that the X-Men films from 20 years
| ago did look pretty good in 4K HDR. And apparently they
| are "real 4K". Also the 4K remaster of The Fifth Element.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sorry, I was assuming we were not talking uprezing and
| true film scans. Uprez outputs can look disastorous as
| people tend to use a heavy amount of noise canceling. Bad
| temporal noise filters look so bad when you can see
| residual artifacts from 4-5 frames earlier. shudders. Or
| someone that did this to content that had a 3:2 cadence,
| and now want to restore to original frame rate even
| though the cadence is undetectable by filters. Select
| fields it is! Ugh. too many flashbacks popping off.
| seanicus wrote:
| The Thing is probably my favorite movie and the practical
| creature effects are still largely considered the gold
| standard of the craft. But in 2K the artificiality is getting
| a lot more noticeable and while I will certainly be getting
| it in 4K I'm starting to realize that maybe 720p is the best
| way to view it for the sake of full immersion. YMMV.
| aconbere wrote:
| Contrasting that to the digital remaster (presumably first
| for DVD) which is AMAZING. They did an incredible job
| restoring the image.
| agumonkey wrote:
| What I feel is that digital medium is too pristine, I dearly
| miss analog limits that gave glare and blurry trails on
| spotlights. Even tone often added to the pictures (another
| instance is Kodachrome). It wasn't a defect imo
| liminal wrote:
| I'm reminded of Scott McCloud's abstract vs realistic
| dimension in Understanding Comics. Basically, abstraction
| allows us to focus on the relevant details, while realism
| adds a lot of details that aren't relevant to the use case
| (in this case, it's following the story/emotions). Here's a
| write up of that section of the book here (but the whole book
| is amazing!):
| https://theteachingtree.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/comics-
| and-...
| jxramos wrote:
| I had the opposite reaction too. One weekend an old friend
| was watching Back to the Future in High Def. It took away
| from the experience, it was like watching a play the
| resolution was so sharp. I couldn't enter into the fiction of
| the story any longer, it prevented the suspension of
| disbelief because it was so realistic. I think that grainier
| lower quality medium facilitated the imagination somehow,
| much like reading a book does.
| xgulfie wrote:
| I was watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S. in HD and there is the
| occasional out-of-focus shot you would never have noticed at
| the intended resolution
| realityking wrote:
| Same with early seasons of House. Really interesting to see
| what you used to be able to get away with.
| evandev wrote:
| Turn off motion smoothing on your TV. It's also called the
| "Soap Opera Effect".
| sumtechguy wrote:
| What is more fun is the latency those effects add to
| images. Found that out the hard way playing some twitchy
| 'have to be just right' on the controls games. In my case
| it was almost 1/4-1/2 of a second. Even with all of the
| settings 'off' there is still a decent latency on the
| screen (down to about 70ms) which is just enough to mess me
| up on some games but not all.
| jaywalk wrote:
| Most newer TVs have a game mode that significantly
| reduces latency by getting rid of almost all processing,
| including stuff that you otherwise can't disable in the
| menu.
| sp332 wrote:
| And some TVs only offer low latency on certain inputs, so
| it pays to do some research.
| copperx wrote:
| Research sounds like a huge time investment. Just read
| the manual.
| ansible wrote:
| I've been using a 46in 4K TV as a monitor, and the lag
| from the video processing felt super odd, until I
| switched the HDMI input to "game mode".
| 0-_-0 wrote:
| Or keep it turned on and get used to it so we can all
| finally start enjoying high frame rate video!
| hyperbovine wrote:
| Believe me I've tried. It's good for sports, meh for TV
| shows, and horrible for films or anything filmed (which
| includes a lot of scripted TV.) I don't think anything
| but 24 (or 23.976) fps will ever look correct to me for
| movies.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Smoothing is orthogonal to high frame rate. You shouldn't
| upscale lower frame rates by making up frames
| (essentially tweening). It adds latency (boo) artifacts
| (boo) and reduces fidelity overall (boo).
|
| If the source happens to have more frames, then show them
| of course. But otherwise I'd prefer to see the same frame
| again for the extra 1/60th of a second.
| saiya-jin wrote:
| This _so_ much. People either don 't use it and then its
| unwatchable with it (my case), or get used to it since its
| default setting on TV and +-don't notice it after some
| time.
|
| Every time I go back visiting parents, which have TV with
| this on, anything on TV feels surreal and not in a good
| way. Which isn't bad, watching TV instead of interacting
| with my parents is stupid waste of time anyway and TV
| itself actively helps with that
| FredPret wrote:
| What a hilarious bug-and-yet-a-useful-feature on the part
| of their TV
| pier25 wrote:
| I have a 65'' OLED TV and 24fps content is unwatchable
| without motion smoothing. When the camera pans, the "jumps"
| between frames are too distracting.
|
| I only use it at about 10-20% though, not at 100% which I
| think is the default setting and I agree is vomitive.
| astrange wrote:
| There's two levels of motion smoothing, one from 24 to
| 60fps and one from 60 to 120fps. The second is important
| for OLED to avoid judder (uncomfortable panning).
|
| I think the people complaining about the first are
| whiners and as a digital video expert I will allow you to
| leave it on.
| jclardy wrote:
| I had this experience watching the Hobbit in high frame rate
| - it felt like I was watching a play, a bunch of actors on a
| stage.
| pier25 wrote:
| I watched the second Hobbit movie in 48fps and it was a
| horrible experience. Everything looked fake, which is how I
| imagine it actually looked in real life. Props seemed made
| of plastic, makeup looked like makeup, etc.
|
| Also, when there was a cut to a new scene, for a few
| seconds my brain thought the movie was playing faster. Like
| those old black and white movies of the early 20th century.
| sp332 wrote:
| That weird speed effect is because they kept the shutter
| open longer on each frame, so there's more motion blur.
| touisteur wrote:
| Oh thanks now I understand some specific sensations of
| uneven speed in movies. I thought it might be linked to
| the player (not), the codec (not)...
| 91aintprime wrote:
| The same effect can be great for sports, animal videos, and
| documentaries.
|
| I would describe the effect of HFR as pushing immersion
| past suspension of disbelief into reality. You can no
| longer see them as characters, you see them as you would as
| if it wasn't through a screen - as you said, like watching
| actors on a stage.
|
| Fortunately(?), humans may get used to HFR as we have with
| previous advancements in video technology. Remember when
| people were freaking out about 4K, 3D, HD, Color, "The
| Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station"?
| lostlogin wrote:
| Is 3D still a thing? It really wasn't for me.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| Second that; Hobbit in particular seemed like a mid-budget
| British made-for-TV show. I _get_ that it 's all
| psychological, that I'm used to deliberate Hollywood
| motion-blur look... but I still couldn't bear it.
|
| But clearly we learned something or there was something
| special about Hobbit, because that hasn't necessarily been
| my experience with _all_ 4k / high-frame shows or
| movies...
| stormbrew wrote:
| I think to a large extent people overestimated how much
| this feeling, specifically in the Hobbit films, came from
| the high frame rate vs. how much came from other
| artistic, creative, and budget choices they made.
|
| I saw them in both normal frame rate and HFR as they were
| coming out and it looked kinda low-budget, weirdly
| lit/color corrected, and generally just clunkier than the
| LotR films did in the moment.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| It didn't help that the movies were way more CGI-heavy
| and cartoony compared to the LotR movies.
| foldr wrote:
| Old lenses are generally fine when stopped down to sensible
| apertures in my experience. What's new is the expectation that
| lenses should be ultra sharp wide open. Expensive lenses are a
| very niche enthusiast market now, so the design criteria aren't
| especially rational.
|
| An exception would be old kit zooms from the film era, which
| really are awful, since they were designed for people who
| rarely even went up to 8x10 prints. Modern kit zooms are
| usually very sharp lenses, though.
| lmilcin wrote:
| Half of reason I even bother with full frame is wide open.
|
| Any smartphone these days can give perfectly good sharp
| photos. I lug the beast around to get shots you can't get
| with a smartphone.
| foldr wrote:
| Shooting wide open is fashionable because it's a sign of
| expensive gear. Once artificial bokeh is perfected I expect
| people will stop obsessing over blurry backgrounds.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| I hope not. My Nikkor 135mm dc is quadrupled in value
| since I bought it :)
|
| DC stands for "defocus control", as distorting the bokeh
| forward of backward.
| rodgerd wrote:
| It's the new high dynamic range - splattered everywhere
| in a gatekeepery effort to substitute "I have spent a lot
| on camera equipment" for "I know how to compose
| photographs in an interesting way".
| velosol wrote:
| I can't speak for lmilcin, but wide open is also critical
| in low light to minimize ISO noise or to even have a stop
| or 2 down from the widest to have a little width in the
| focal plane while still capturing action.
|
| Agreed on the shots where you're at 1.4 and pushing the
| limits of your shutter speed.
| bitL wrote:
| Now do the same with Sigma SD1 and quality lens and you'd be
| frustrated with the "sharp images from new cameras" the same
| way you consider old ones "faulty". Some things can't be unseen
| once you see them the first time.
| foldr wrote:
| I think a lot of this must be psychological. Anyone can
| generate an extremely high res image nowadays by using a
| longer focal length and stitching four images together with a
| consumer grade SLR. Expensive bits of gear can be superior to
| that method in terms of the workflow (and sometimes results,
| given the limitations of stitching) but they aren't magical.
|
| I know some will vociferously disagree with this statement,
| but I'd like to see that backed up by proper side by side
| comparisons.
|
| We know for sure that people do rationalize the purchase of
| expensive gear with reference to spurious properties (such as
| the mythical "medium format look").
| copperx wrote:
| Are you saying that the medium format look isn't real?
| foldr wrote:
| Light rays don't know the size of the sensor that they're
| headed for. So clearly the size of the format can't
| affect the 'rendering' or whatever other subjective
| property people want to attribute to MF. Imagine masking
| off the sides of a MF sensor with tape: you now have a
| full frame camera which must necessarily retain the
| 'medium format look'. Or similarly, imagine mounting an
| MF lens on a full frame camera (which you can in fact
| do). Aside from the crop, the rendering of the image must
| be the same.
|
| The preceding considerations show that the medium format
| look, if it exists, must be a property that goes away as
| soon as you crop the photo. But none of the candidates
| for this alleged look (e.g. 'rendering' of out of focus
| regions) has that property.
|
| In principle, medium format should offer shallower depth
| of field. However, in practice, medium format lenses
| rarely go beyond f2.8 whereas crazy ~f1 lenses are
| available for full frame. So if you really want
| ludicrously shallow depth of field you're probably better
| off with full frame.
|
| All this being said, it's obviously the case that any
| given medium format lens might look different from any
| given full frame or crop sensor lens. Perhaps there are
| even generalisations about the 'look' of commonly used MF
| lenses vs. commonly used FF lenses (though I have never
| seen any evidence for this).
|
| In-lens leaf shutters can also make a real difference,
| and are more common on medium format cameras.
|
| On an anecdotal level, I'd add that I shoot a bit of 4x5
| film as a hobby and the photos 'look' the same as the
| photos I take on my phone with its tiny sensor (apart
| from the expected differences such as resolution, grain,
| depth of field).
|
| This site has some side-by-side comparisons of FF and MF:
| https://srussenschuck.com/review-fujifilm-gfx-50s/
| frostburg wrote:
| I really like my DP3m, but (with static subjects, which
| honestly you need with the Sigma, too) modern multi-shot
| implementation (especially the Panasonic one) get pretty
| close.
| bitL wrote:
| Yeah, Sigma is clunky, 60% of my shots end up out of focus,
| but the best shots I get are simply unbelievable. Zooming
| in to a pixel level is way better than anything else I saw,
| including 100MP medium format ones, the pictures feel
| alive. Never experienced anything like that with another
| camera.
| subhro wrote:
| In the other news, /me is supremely happy with his Schneider
| 300mm 8x10 Large format and Hasselblad/Zeiss medium format
| lenses.
|
| The world is not just 35mm in size.
| u678u wrote:
| Does anyone know the margins on these lenses? I'm guessing theyre
| low volume high markup. I get that they're precision instruments
| but a few grand for some polished glass seems high.
| Badfood wrote:
| Over the years I've needed high end gear in a hurry mostly for
| emergency work after hurricanes or wildfires. I have dealt with
| all the rental houses in the US and the one the author of this
| article founded is hands down the best (lens rentals., on) .
|
| Its interesting how much effect the founder can have on a
| business even after its grown large. You can tell if the company
| exists primarily to fulfill a mission or just as a money making
| exersize.
| proudfoot wrote:
| This is an excellent interactive primer on basic lens design for
| anyone interested: https://ciechanow.ski/cameras-and-lenses/
| lr1970 wrote:
| These modern 50mm lenses are certainly marvels of optical
| engineering. But the future seem to belong to simpler, cheaper
| and lighter lens designs with optical imperfections corrected
| digitally. Modern phones take stunning images (in good light)
| with optically inferior lenses.
| Sebb767 wrote:
| Not really. Phone cameras have become really good, yes. But
| that's in well lit conditions on a phone screen. But zoom in
| and you'll start to see imperfections and noise. Under worse
| conditions they'll not be worth anything if you want to use
| that photo.
|
| Phones effectively killed the small camera market, but anything
| on the prosumer level or higher will run circles around them.
| imaginenore wrote:
| Until we have metamaterials to make super flat lenses,
| smartphones will suck compared to full frame or MF cameras.
| Especially when it comes to low light performance.
|
| Modern mirrorless cameras paired with fast 1.2 lenses basically
| have night vision. No smartphone comes close.
| whoisburbansky wrote:
| What are folks' favorite overviews on how these lenses work?
| Basic optics from my high school physics classes topped out at
| the telephoto lens from the article, what would be a good place
| to start to get a better sense of how the designs in the article
| help with distortion?
|
| [Edit: Found https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2011/08/lens-
| geneology-part..., which looks like a promising start]
| ben7799 wrote:
| I love 50mm lenses but a lot of this stuff is ridiculously
| academic since photography is artistic & creative in nature.
|
| DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even
| care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they
| have better photo gear than others.
|
| These new 50mm lenses often defeat the point cause they're
| enormous, heavy, very expensive, and have little benefit over the
| slower versions of old lenses since most of the time we don't
| walk around shooting everything at f/1.0-f/1.4, and when we do
| we're actually looking for some artistic weirdness.
|
| I've mostly had Canon.. I've owned the old f/1.8, the f/1.4,
| currently have the newer f/1.8, and have rented the f/1.2.
|
| Even the Canon f/1.2, it's older, and not as big/heavy as some of
| these more recent ones, but it's already so big it feels silly
| most of the time compared to the smaller/cheaper ones.
|
| It was useful as a rental for specific scenarios, and the new
| huge/expensive ones are likewise. They're great though if you're
| going to compare your gear collection instead of your photographs
| though.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| beginners care about cameras, amateurs care about lenses, pros
| care about motifs.
| bayindirh wrote:
| > DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't
| even care about the art aspect...
|
| As a hobbyist photographer and a reader of DPReview, I can tell
| that you can find what you're looking for. There also guys who
| are in for the art, in for the studio photography or just for
| gear.
|
| These kind of technical articles makes me happy and piques my
| interest deeply, because I love to know how things work, and
| why they're designed this way.
|
| I'm personally aware that better gear makes my photography
| better, however I love to know theoretical capabilities and
| limits of my gear. Understanding my gear made my photography
| better and DPReview's both articles and forums helped me a lot
| TBH.
|
| For the most light and scenarios, f2.8 is very suitable from my
| experience, esp. with latest generation of sensors (A7III,
| Z6/7, etc.), however in extreme dim light (I shoot tango
| dancing, BTW), f1.8 is really helping. Since you're away from
| subjects too, DoF becomes very acceptable too.
|
| I agree that unless you've a specific need, f1.4 and f1.2
| lenses are halo products. As a Sony shooter, that 2.5/40mm lens
| [0] is very compelling for street photography from perspective.
|
| At the end of the day, new lenses are giant leaps when compared
| to older ones in terms of resolution and sharpness. Older
| lenses indeed have character but, newer ones are not always
| devoid of it.
|
| [0]: https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g
| Sharlin wrote:
| > DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't
| even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that
| they have better photo gear than others.
|
| To be fair, the author of this article is Roger Cicala of
| LensRentals fame [1]; optical testing is his bread and butter.
| He's also the first to point out that optimal lens performance
| is neither necessary nor sufficient for good photography, and
| is famously snarky in his writing towards "spec sheet warriors"
| and sharpness-obsessed gearheads.
|
| [1] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/author/roger/
| subhro wrote:
| This is so much correct. Modern lenses feels very clinical to
| me. It is like showing someone a passport photograph and
| asking if it is a good portrait.
| hyperbovine wrote:
| (S)he's got a point about though DPReview, Fred Miranda, and
| all the rest. Dear God, those forums---on the rare occasion
| when someone stops wanking about "bokeh" long enough to
| actually post a photograph, it tends to serve as a stark
| reminder of how little time most of those users spend
| creating art vs. talking about machines.
| ben7799 wrote:
| I'm not trying to pick on Roger he writes well and his stuff
| is way higher quality than most DPReview content.
|
| He rents lenses, and a big point of what I'm saying is these
| fancy lenses are very often specialist tools that are much
| better to rent from someone like him occasionally when you
| need something very special, but that doesn't make them
| better items to own vs the less expensive & smaller/lighter
| 50mm lenses.
| intpx wrote:
| > photography is artistic & creative in nature.
|
| This is a pretty broad generalization. There is plenty of
| photography that is nothing but technical. Also, the technical
| side of photography is what drives the innovation to enable the
| creative side. Do hobbyist landscape and portrait photographers
| need to be pouring over test data like this or even benefit in
| appreciable ways from these advances? Not likely. But the R&D
| that is done in optics begins with some of the most technical
| fields and trickles down.
| [deleted]
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| People that are just getting started get suckered into buying
| expensive niche gear. You can quickly go down the rabbit hole,
| and listen to people that talk about the size shape of their
| Bokeh balls, from radio active lenses they keep in their
| bedroom dresser all day long on youtube.
| ISL wrote:
| Sounds like the 40mm f/2.8 might resonate for you :).
| breischl wrote:
| Yeah, you're not wrong. There are people who are into
| photography for photographs, and then there are people are into
| it for the gear. Not that the latter is necessarily a bad hobby
| - no worse than any other collecting type of hobby - but it's
| not the same thing at all.
|
| I do like reading Roger's work (here and at his LensRentals
| blog) just for curiosity about how lenses actually work,
| though.
| hrktb wrote:
| Would you make the same line of comment on a anandtech chipset
| review, arguing it's ridiculously technical and doesn't take
| into account the art of progamming ?
|
| I am pretty glad dpreview does these kind of technical reviews,
| it nicely completes other photographer reviews who'll dig more
| on the experience and real world impact side of things.
| breischl wrote:
| A lot of photographers buy amazing gear, and ignore the fact
| that they lack the skill that would use it well or even
| require that gear.
|
| I think the closest analog might be someone that reads the
| reviews, buys the latest-and-greatest computing hardware...
| and then uses it to surf the web and play Tetris.
| kergonath wrote:
| Even if it were the case, what is wrong with that? I mean,
| we can buy fancy cars without having a background in
| engineering, right? All the sneering about people being bad
| photographers and not needing the latest gear is out of
| touch. Average photographers benefit immensely from fast
| autofocus with full frame coverage, better sensors and
| better optics that make taking pictures in difficult
| conditions easier.
|
| Besides, some people like the technical optical engineering
| aspect of it and are happy to follow the latest
| developments in the same way that some people feel the urge
| to read articles on the latest HPC Xeon. Gatekeeping and
| condescension is completely unwarranted.
| breischl wrote:
| Average photographers can certainly benefit from better
| gear to a degree. But for many people (myself included) a
| $300 lens will work as well (or even better) than a $3000
| one. Which I think is the point the original commenter
| was making.
|
| The sneering is pretty typical for any hobby that lumps
| practitioners and collectors under the same heading. The
| former group tends to see the gear as mere tools, to be
| used as needed to achieve some other end. For the latter
| group the gear is the whole thing - or perhaps talking
| about the gear.
|
| Neither is bad, but it would probably work better to call
| the hobbies by different names. Perhaps "photographers"
| and "camera collectors" or something. But then, being a
| collector doesn't have quite the same cachet as being an
| artist.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Yah I should have called out that there are different
| interests and Photography is very much composed of:
|
| - Photographers - Modern Gear collectors - Vintage Gear
| collectors
|
| You can have a little bit of each of these 3 you're
| interested in, and you won't necessarily always have the
| same interest in each area.
|
| But people who are 100% interested in one of the gear
| collecting aspects are pretty common and are very far
| from the artistic side.
| kergonath wrote:
| > Average photographers can certainly benefit from better
| gear to a degree. But for many people (myself included) a
| $300 lens will work as well (or even better) than a $3000
| one. Which I think is the point the original commenter
| was making.
|
| I agree somewhat, which is why I mostly use a cheap lens,
| and an ancient EOS 60D. However, I think the $3,000 lens
| is a red herring. The vast majority of lenses sold are
| kit lenses or cheap plastic. Because whilst there is an
| awful lot of average photographers, not all of them are
| millionaires. Now, to actual millionaires $3,000 are
| probably worth less than $300 for me, so I don't see how
| I would have a moral high ground.
|
| Honestly, this is a made up problem. Some people prefer
| working on composition, some are better at capturing
| subtle lights, and some have a technical mind. These
| people still buy camera and take pictures, as a hobby. So
| why wouldn't they be called "hobbyist photographers" like
| the rest of us? And why does it have any importance
| whatsoever?
| breischl wrote:
| The expensive lenses are usually big and heavy. If you
| don't need that degree of sharpness, then it's
| potentially a worse tool than a lighter (and cheaper)
| lens.
|
| >So why wouldn't they be called "hobbyist photographers"
| like the rest of us?
|
| I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my
| previous comment. Basically if you're in it for the love
| of the gear rather than to make photographs that's fine,
| but your hobby is collecting rather than photography. Or,
| to put it another way, photography _gear_ rather than
| photo-making.
|
| >why does it have any importance whatsoever?
|
| Sometimes the photo-makers get annoyed at being lumped in
| with the gear collectors. And a fair number of people get
| taken in reading the gearhead commentary and end up
| buying expensive lenses that won't actually help that
| person take better photos.
| kergonath wrote:
| > I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my
| previous comment.
|
| Yes, you did. Sorry, it shouldn't have sounded so
| personal. My real problem is with the community in
| general.
|
| > Basically if you're in it for the love of the gear
| rather than to make photographs that's fine, but your
| hobby is collecting rather than photography.
|
| The thing is, it is a spectrum between pinhole
| photographers and gear heads. There are different optima
| for different people along the way, but fundamentally
| they all do the same thing: taking pictures. So where do
| you draw the line, and who gets to choose who is branded
| a legitimate photographer instead of some weirdo with too
| much money?
|
| I have never seen any evidence that "collectors" (in the
| sense of people who buy modern gear without taking any
| picture with it; there are plenty of legitimate
| collectors of old cameras) really are that common, or any
| more common than soccer moms who buy a camera to collect
| dust. Every time they are mentioned it is as bogeymen on
| a photography forum. It is puzzling that a community
| would show so extreme sentiments towards one of its
| subsets. And I am a railway modeller, so I am not
| stranger to strongly opinionated hobbyists.
|
| > And a fair number of people get taken in reading the
| gearhead commentary and end up buying expensive lenses
| that won't actually help that person take better photos.
|
| Sure, that is a problem for some people who are eager to
| give themselves the right tools and get to overspend. And
| to be honest most of us are willing to fall into that
| trap.
| breischl wrote:
| >it is a spectrum
|
| Yeah, for sure, I didn't intend to make it sound like as
| much of a clear cut dichotomy as I ended up doing.
|
| >who is branded a legitimate photographer instead of some
| weirdo with too much money?
|
| You ask the Internet Photography Police to render a
| verdict, of course! But yeah, it's not a clearcut
| distinction in most cases.
| stiglitz wrote:
| I think the problem with enthusiasm for unnecessary
| consumer goods is the environmental impact.
|
| I do agree consumers don't deserve condescension for
| geeking about technical details, but I still see it as at
| least ironic when somebody buys an overengineered
| product.
| ben7799 wrote:
| The think with an Anandtech chipset review is the faster
| chipset doesn't have big negatives unless power consumption
| is a major concern.
|
| The excessive weight of these modern 50mm lens can be a real
| detriment to getting better photographs. It makes you less
| mobile, and you can only carry so much weight. If you're
| carring 10x more weight for your 50mm lens than an older
| design that is 95% as high quality you inevitably have to
| leave something else out of the pack.
| heartbreak wrote:
| There are modern 50s that don't weigh as much, but they're
| also not super-fast f/1.2 glass.
| hrktb wrote:
| Chipsets have all sort of properties, including the
| instruction set, the consumption as you mention, their
| physical size and heat profile (related to consumption, but
| can be influenced by other factors) that make them better
| or worse for some applications.
|
| Your point on lens weight is valid, but I don't see it as
| something that should be in every single lens optic review,
| all the more so the use case of 50mm lenses are not just
| street snaps for instance.
| diarrhea wrote:
| Yes, pretty much. I loved my low-range Canon gear (100D, Sigma
| lenses). When the Sony a7R3 came out, I got it alongside an
| array of GM lenses. My God do they blow everything out of the
| water. It's an insane kit. The best part is the great autofocus
| of the body; even in low light, even in rapid movement, even in
| burst shots. Among 1000 shots, I can count focus misses on one
| hand.
|
| _However_ , the entire thing feels artificial. It's hard to
| describe. I don't want to go back, but getting shots is so
| _easy_ now that it 's less of a rewarding feeling nailing a
| shot. Messed up ISO? Doesn't matter, sensor is ISO-invariant,
| just adjust exposure in post at no cost to quality. You cannot
| mess up focus anymore. At 10fps, you cannot miss a shot anymore
| (mostly).
| gowld wrote:
| To me, "artificial" is going out of your way to make the job
| harder so you can have a more "handmade" feeling. By
| rejecting the "artificial" camera, you are coosing a more
| artificial photo shoot.
|
| I like good pictures, so I find it more rewarding when a shot
| succeeds and I can move on to other shots or try a harder
| shot for a better picture. I can play video games when I need
| extra fake challenge because life is too easy.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I watched a couple of movies back to back this weekend, and
| it was so striking the difference in quality. One was a
| middle-budget movie from the 70s, the other a recent lower-
| budget indie (well I imagine, three actors and one location).
|
| The movie from the 70s had so many out of focus shots,
| tracking shots were a bit hit or miss and colors were rather
| poor (mostly just flat but also color balance issues between
| scenes).
|
| The modern indie movie looked almost like any triple-A movie,
| with crisp focus, smooth tracking and with lovely natural
| colors, even in low light.
|
| Not like it came as a surprise as such, but just the back to
| back experience highlighted the contrast. Really made me sit
| and appreciate the technological advances.
| FredPret wrote:
| One day we'll be watching personalised auto-generated
| content and it'll blow everything else out of the water.
|
| Imagine if content can be generated, real-time, by an AI
| that monitors your brain for signs of engagement. Holy
| shit, what if that's what this life actually is!
| sshumaker wrote:
| If that's the case the AI needs some work. :P
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I had this feeling coming from a Canon DSLR (at the time) to
| my friend's A7RIII, something was...lost in it. Every shot
| looked perfect and it felt like there was no art really to
| it. I'm sure that to a portrait photographer they feel as it
| it lets them just focus on comp but wow.
| heartbreak wrote:
| Yeah if you're using the camera as a tool to make money,
| the perfection of the recent Sony Alpha full frame cameras
| is exactly what you want.
|
| I recommend analog to people who want fulfillment from the
| process itself.
| thetinguy wrote:
| Dpreview is owned by Amazon.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > DPReview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't
| even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that
| they have better photo gear than others.
|
| DPReview, FStoppers, PetaPixel, and back in before the web the
| Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines. There's a
| big market for prosumer gear that costs a lot, has ideal
| technical specs, and hangs around the owner's neck like a
| prize. Of course these outlets, and the magazines before them,
| get almost all their money from advertisers, and run lots of
| review articles ( _totally_ objective of course /s) and are of
| almost zero interest to anyone working in the industry.
|
| Great photographs can be taken with any camera.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| slight correction:
|
| In good light, great photographs can be taken with any
| camera.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's true although the best smartphones have made pretty
| significant gains. I've been slowly working my way through
| my catalog of photos to clean it up and go back to a lot of
| my older phone photos taken in dim restaurants and the like
| and the photos were generally pretty awful.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "Light makes photography. Embrace light. Admire it. Love
| it. But above all, know light. Know it for all you are
| worth, and you will know the key to photography." -- George
| Eastman
|
| The trick is knowing what can be made with available light.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| DPReview seems to have rather balanced reporting (I'm not a
| regular reader), so they do seem to be at least somewhat
| independent of being directly sponsored by whoever they're
| reviewing at the time. Compare this to pretty much every
| photo-vlogger/blogger/grammer out there, which have massive
| audiences while making unclear claims of independence and un-
| biasedness while shilling very hard.
| cratermoon wrote:
| > DPReview seems to have rather balanced reporting
|
| It's big enough and has a diverse enough community that it
| can avoid the worst excesses of pay-per-review.
| [deleted]
| ben7799 wrote:
| DPreview was owned by Amazon last time I looked. They exist
| mostly to pump up the camera market and generate sales.
|
| Their writing is very much in the vein of "your gear is
| inadequate if a new version has come out."
|
| They are really the bottom of the barrel. They continually
| write about how some new piece of gear is so revolutionary
| because it allows you to take a particular photo and it was
| impossible before, as long as you didn't know about the
| 50-100 year old technique to get around the issue that
| actually works better even if you have the brand new
| camera.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| A while ago I read a comment that was really eye opener: most
| big YouTube photography channels out there are mostly about
| gear, not about "taking pictures". It shows how much money
| the industry moves (or how prevalent GAS is).
| jcun4128 wrote:
| > GAS
|
| Haha... I was getting sucked into this, still am in a way.
| I spent about a year (2019) with a now cheap Sony Nex-5n
| with an 18-55 kit lens... but wanted to upgrade, more MP,
| higher video quality... got an A7II (24MP, 1080P) and then
| an A7RIII (42MP, 4K) ... I bought a 12-24mm F4 G lens at
| $1.3K __USED__ which to me is insane and that's not even
| that much in this space. It's just my car is $2K... I still
| can't comprehend it... I've been poor most of my life till
| recently, I still am poor but yeah... just interesting
| climbing the levels... Since the last month or two
| purchased 6 other lenses recently all under $1K but yeah...
| it's like "I need that 55mm" or "I need "12mm" just
| funny... then you think, this money is just sitting on your
| shelf not invested... idk.
|
| I am self aware though, FIRE and make more money in
| general, try to avoid the above.
| jk7tarYZAQNpTQa wrote:
| On contrast, I've been into photography for more than 20
| years, and I currently own a Nikon D60 that was gifted to
| me 2 or 3 years ago (and that would cost less than $200
| if I would have bought it instead). I can afford an A7IV
| or whatever is the latest gear, I just don't want to.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Wait, you got a car for $2,000?
| pierrec wrote:
| Seems right for a used Civic in good working condition.
| And it will get you wherever the beautiful shots are
| without giving trouble.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Huh. I've never owned a car or tried to buy one--I live
| in NYC and I never got around to getting a driver's
| license. I was just under the impression cars cost many
| times that much at minimum.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| Yeah a used one from the lot, it was a mistake, lots of
| money to fix it... another stupid moment.
|
| Not saying you can't get a good car for that price but
| yeah.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The most I've ever spent on a camera was just under $2K,
| in July of 2019, for a 35mm manual rangefinder, without a
| light meter, built in 1953.
| astrange wrote:
| Sony's $2k cameras are extremely worth it, and they can
| mount rangefinder lenses, which saves you buying their
| (also good) FE-mount lenses.
| randy909 wrote:
| Same situation with my hobby, making electronic music.
| While there are a ton of amazing tutorials for how to write
| music there are way more gear review videos with orders of
| magnitude more views. Its fun to shop for new toys,
| learning new things is work.
| cratermoon wrote:
| The forums for guitar players are often dominated by gear
| discussions unless carefully moderated. The good forums
| make efforts to sequester all the GAS discussions to
| their own corner.
| vgeek wrote:
| Seconded.
|
| Kai W (& Lok) was solid when he was there, since he would
| trash things that deserved it and his juvenile objectivity
| was humorous. Now they seem more generic in the "this
| marginally better camera is 100% worth buying" sense.
| [deleted]
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I have the older f1/4 EF that I use adapted to an M6. It's way
| soft under 2.2 or so and basically unusable for any non-flat
| objects under 30 feet at wide-open as the shallow DoF will blur
| a cheek if the nose is in focus.
|
| That said, it works magic at night.
| dheera wrote:
| I love my Contax Zeiss Planar 50/1.4. It's small and compact,
| feels like a precision instrument, has lovely rendition, is
| sharp as a tack in the center at f/2 and sharp corner-to-corner
| at f/4, built like a tank, has a super long focus throw for
| precision focusing, and cheaper than most equivalent modern
| lenses.
|
| It's perhaps my second most frequently used lens, after the
| 28/2 "Hollywood" Distagon (which isn't really all that sharp
| off-center, and sports very strong vignetting, but produces a
| beautiful, dramatic quality).
| dekoruotas wrote:
| Unfortunately these are now nearly impossible to find without
| spending silly money... Where did you acquire yours?
| dheera wrote:
| Several from old grannies and grandpas selling stuff on
| Craigslist, a couple from the MIT Swapfest and other flea
| markets, some from the FredMiranda and MFLenses Buy&Sell
| forums.
|
| A few from eBay, some good deals pop up every now and then
| if you're patient for a few months and set up notifications
| based on keywords rather than thinking "I need this lens
| right now".
|
| Sometimes if you see an auction on eBay with a high
| starting price and no bids, it's possible they have been
| re-listing the item for a long time, and you can message
| the seller and say you'll buy it right now at a lower price
| if they turn on that option; many would be happy to be
| "done with it" and sold. Sometimes if the seller is local
| you can convince them to cancel the listing and do an off-
| eBay, in-person sale for cash at a discount (eBay charges a
| lot of seller fees).
|
| If you bid on an actual eBay auction, place your bid with
| the highest price you are actually willing to pay and ONLY
| in the last 10 seconds, or preferably last 3 seconds. By
| doing that you will either lose OR win but get it at just
| slightly higher than the next highest bidder's max price
| and significantly less than your stated price, while
| leaving that second bidder with no time to re-think and re-
| bid. By doing the single last-minute bid, you effectively
| turn the auction into a sealed-bid, second-price (Vickrey)
| auction for yourself, which is most efficient for you in a
| game theoretic sense.
|
| KEH has very reasonable prices on most old lenses. Not
| cheap, but very reasonable.
|
| Also, if you're willing to take apart a lens with a slight
| amount of haze/fungus, sanitize and clean the hell out of
| it (not for faint of heart), and put it back together, you
| can get some very, very steep discounts. Or if the lens has
| a couple of scratches, you can get steep steep discounts
| due to loss of antique value, you don't need to take
| anything apart, and it will have zero noticeable impact on
| wide aperture images.
| dekoruotas wrote:
| Such a great answer! Thank you. I've just bought a Planar
| 50/1.7 last month and can't wait for the scanned negs to
| come back any minute now.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| Completely agree with this, if I open a 50mm to f/1.4 I usually
| don't care about extreme sharpness, I want the shallow DoF. I'm
| a Pentax weirdo, I have a couple of old 50's - one of them is
| even AF.
|
| (OTOH if I open a 200mm as wide as it goes I definitely do
| prefer it sharp - different scenario.)
| jdjkckfkrrn wrote:
| I had an old metal very well regarded 50 mm prime, 1.4 f.
|
| I also had a modern plastic 18-55 mm kit lens, high f (starting
| at 3.5).
|
| But the colors on the modern zoom lens were so much better. Hard
| to explain, but they just looked better, kind of like a DSLR
| photo has "better" colors than a phone photo.
|
| It was very confusing, I was expecting differences in sharpness
| maybe, but not in colors.
| proudfoot wrote:
| You can fix the colors in post production.
| dylan604 wrote:
| sometimes. shooting in RAW helps. shooting in JPEG limits
| your post abilities.
| bigdubs wrote:
| A lot of that has to do with coatings modern lenses use to
| correct for chromatic aberration, but also how they minimize
| loss of contrast from light bouncing around inside the lens.
|
| It really is incredible how much a lens affects the final
| image.
| dylan604 wrote:
| It's all about the glass. There's an old saying with cameras
| and lenses: buy the glass, rent the camera. Cameras change
| quickly, but lenses remain for a lot longer. Lots of comments
| in this thread talking about how they prefer the older
| lenses. Each series of lenses have a "look" to them that
| people become attached. Modern lenses are approaching 0
| distortion in color/sharpness/etc. For some users, that's
| what they want. For others, they prefer the softer looks. So
| find the lenses you like, buy them, and use them on what ever
| camera you can.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I've also had this "shock" with lenses much closer in
| generation.
|
| I had a Canon 40D a while ago, and at first I was using a
| 17-40/4. I absolutely loved the colors I would get. Gradients
| would have a certain "creaminess" to them.
|
| Then I figured I'd change it for a 17-55/2.8, to get some extra
| light at night. That was pretty much when I stopped going out
| taking pictures altogether. I just wasn't getting the pictures
| I wanted anymore. Everything looked just... weird and
| unsatisfactory. I then sold everything a when I realized I
| hadn't touched the camera in a year.
|
| A few years later I got to do a similar comparison again,
| between the Olympus 17/1.8 and the Panasonic 20/1.7 on a Pen-F.
| The panny was OK, sharp, etc. But there was just something
| missing that the oly had. A kind of delicate rendering of
| gradients that just appealed to me.
|
| This was when I realized what had happened with the Canon
| change earlier. I had believed that I had just lost interest in
| photography or that for some reason I just "didn't have it"
| anymore. I had never thought that a lens that was rated better
| in practically every aspect would actually be so uninspiring to
| me.
| astrange wrote:
| What were you editing the output with? Did it have accurate
| lens compensation?
|
| Even just fixing the vignette some lenses add is enough to
| make pictures no longer depressing. If the lens adds
| chromatic aberration that's quite difficult to fix though.
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| I was using whatever the latest Lightroom version was at
| the time. I started using the 17-40 around 2009-2010 I'd
| say, and I bought the 17-55 much later, so I suppose that
| Lightroom support improved in the meantime. Plus the
| difference was apparent on the camera's screen, with all
| the controls unchanged between the lenses.
|
| I actually tend to add vignetting in post-processing, so
| that's likely not the cause. The issues I had were with
| color rendition, and in particular with subtle variations
| in tone.
|
| I don't remember there being any strong chromatic
| aberration either. I remember that both the 17-55/2.8 and
| the 17-40/4 where quite highly rated at the time, with the
| former having a better measured quality than the latter,
| even on a crop sensor.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I don't remember there being any
| "technical" issues with the 17-55. It was plenty sharp and
| aberrations were kept to a minimum, especially since I
| never pushed my luck with strong backlight, etc.
|
| But maybe that's the thing, images were maybe too
| "clinical". I wouldn't say the pictures were "depressing",
| they were just... "meh". Like random snapshots. Sharp,
| well-exposed snapshots, but snapshots still.
|
| ---
|
| Edit: Regarding editing, I should add that I experimented
| with DxO optics, which had profiles for both lenses. The
| corrections were quite amazing, especially at the wide end.
| But given my usual subject matter, I never considered the
| change meaningful, so it didn't bother with it in my
| regular workflow.
| cwmartin wrote:
| Archive link since the original appears to be down right now:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20210510151205/https://www.dprev...
| dmtroyer wrote:
| *very high aperture 50mm lenses.
| tyho wrote:
| I recently got back into photography after a decade break.
| Brought a nice mirrorless camera and a few good lenses (Sony
| A7iii, 24-105 f/4, 35mm f/1.8). I was truly blown away at the
| progress that has been made in handheld imaging. The difference
| between my old Cannon EOS 450d and my current equipment is
| immense.
|
| What has happened to the iPhone camera in the last 10 years has
| also happened to handheld cameras too, but they were starting
| from a much better place, most people just haven't realised as
| the iPhone is good enough for almost everything.
| azhenley wrote:
| Great camera. Don't discount the 3rd party E-mount lens makers,
| such as Samyang.
|
| If you are unsure what to get next, I suggest looking at this
| list of every E-mount full-frame lens:
|
| https://briansmith.com/sony-a7-a7r-a7s-lens-guide/
| Matrixik wrote:
| And Tamron. Everyone remembering Tamron from 10 years ago
| looks at me as if I'm insane for using Tamron zooms (that was
| all released in last 2-3 years) on Sony A7 III. Then I show
| them end results and they are making big eyes. They are sharp
| and looking really good. As good as best Sony zooms or Sigma?
| No, but really close and cheaper.
|
| I'm looking now to buy Tamron 28-200 that is basically best
| super zoom available on any system (including first party
| zooms). Excellent for vacations.
| petepete wrote:
| People used to give Sigma such a hard time over quality,
| but they (and Tamron, Tokina, Venus Optics, etc) have come
| such a long way.
|
| Sigma have been top of DXOMARK's scores for the last five
| years.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I'm a bit of a Photography Amateur but the Sigma I have
| on my A6100 is my only non-kit lens and it absolutely
| blew me away as to how much I spent (~300$) for the
| quality. Just wish it had OIS.
| dagmx wrote:
| Second the recommendation for Tamron. I have their 70-200
| f/2.8 with stabilization. It's amazing, especially for the
| price.
|
| I shoot concerts with it on an A7ii. The lens is great. The
| camera body however is showing its age which is
| unfortunate, but I'll upgrade in a generation or two.
| Matrixik wrote:
| Oh, you are talking about older version for cameras with
| mirror. I'm talking about newer one designed from scratch
| for mirror less cameras. They are even better and getting
| really close to Sony lenses (even better than some like
| new 70-180 f/2.8 is cheaper and better than Sony 70-200
| f/4).
| king_phil wrote:
| I recently got started with photography (A7R M2) and the
| tamron 28-70 f/2.8 is my first zoom. Have a 28mm 2.8,
| 40mm 2.8, 85mm 2.8 but the tamron is the one that is
| almost always mounted (or the sony 28mm). It's truly
| amazing.
| post_break wrote:
| Don't forget rokinon. The sharpest lens I've ever used was my
| cheap manual rokinon 35mm. It was heavy as hell but holy crap
| was it sharp.
| azhenley wrote:
| Rokinon and Samyang are the same company. For some of their
| lenses, you can actually buy the same lens with either
| branding.
| twalla wrote:
| If you want to go even deeper down the rabbithole the Alphas
| are also great manual lens platforms.
|
| https://phillipreeve.net/blog/manual-lenses-sony-a7/
|
| Plus, a comprehensive list from the same folks for all the E
| mount lenses:
|
| https://phillipreeve.net/blog/fe-lenses-sony-
| comprehensive-i...
| azhenley wrote:
| Definitely. I recommend grabbing a Helios-44 58mm off eBay
| and a cheap adapter from Amazon.
| twalla wrote:
| I have one of these and would second the recommendation -
| really cool bokeh, light and cheap enough that I don't
| mind bashing it around. Seems they've gotten more
| expensive compared to when I purchased mine though (I
| think I paid 50-60 USD)
|
| Generally speaking all of the M42 mount Soviet Zeiss
| clones will be interesting and relatively affordable.
| fudged71 wrote:
| Sony really set the bar and lit a fire under their competitors
| to move faster
| patorjk wrote:
| My Nikkor 50mm 1.8G is one of my favorite lenses. When I had a
| cropped sensor DSLR I used it as my portrait lens, and when I
| upgraded to a full frame I started using it as a general purpose
| lens. It creates beautiful images. I've always been curious about
| the versions with a lower f-stop, but the price always makes me
| think twice.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| I came so close to buying this lens when I got a Nikon D750
| last fall. I'm not really a photographer, but I was unsatisfied
| with the images coming out of my phone, and if I was going to
| get a dedicated camera, I wanted to go "all the way", so to
| speak.
|
| But the problem with 50mm prime lenses is they all seem to lack
| image stabilization. (The one exception I could find, a 45mm
| from Tamron[1], has bad chromatic aberration which really
| bothered me when I tried it out.) Maybe OS isn't essential in
| all situations, but not having it just seems like a needless
| downgrade for no benefit.
|
| 1: https://www.tamron-usa.com/product/lenses/f013.html
| t-writescode wrote:
| An old rule of thumb when it comes to image stabilization
| needs is that you should be able to hand-hold the lens at
| 1/focal length without too much loss.
|
| That's 1/50 for a 50mm 1/200 for a 200mm, etc.
|
| For everything else, there's a tripod.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Short, fast primes are rarely optically stabilized. That
| Tamron series (35-45-85/1.8 VC) is the only exception I know.
|
| While these can be stabilized using IBIS on mirrorless
| cameras, I have just that combination (Nikon Z6 + 50/1.8G)
| and the VR is less useful than you'd think, because being
| around f/2.0 already gets you to shutter-speeds where it's
| not really necessary, and a 50 mm can go pretty slow without
| stabilization anyway.
| petepete wrote:
| Unless you're really shaky I wouldn't think you'd need VR in
| a 50mm lens, especially with a D750 where you can push the
| iso quite aggressively without much impact.
|
| You can get a 50mm f/1.8 for about PS90 used, you can find
| the 50mm f/1.4 D for a similar price too.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Spend a few bucks and get a manual focus version from eBay to
| play around with before you spend more on an AF version.
| You'll be pleasantly surprised.
|
| At the low noise levels that you get with high ISO on a D750
| you really don't need stabilization w/ an f/1.8 50mm. Turn on
| auto-ISO and cap it it ISO 6400 or 3200. Even in low light
| you'll get reasonable shutter speeds at f/4.
| distantsounds wrote:
| oh hey i have read many of your AOL files over the years,
| cheers :)
| spoonjim wrote:
| I'll save you a click: this article basically says "to make them
| better." Little explanation of what the elements do.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "better" is subjective, though. They design the lens to meet
| certain technical criteria[1] for minimizing distortion,
| spherical and chromatic aberration, flare, diffraction, etc.
| They are optically near perfect. But are they better, really?
| Better than classic Leica Summicrons, Kodak Ektars, Schneider
| Xenars, Rodenstock Grandagon-Ns, or a Speed Graphic retrofitted
| with a 1940s 7" (185mm) Aero Ektar?
|
| [1]https://lightartacademy.com/tutorials/defects-in-lenses-
| all-...
| tristor wrote:
| I've never been unhappy with my older Nikon 50mm lenses, and the
| Zeiss 50mm lenses are fantastic and have been for years. What I'm
| really happy with on newer lenses is technology like fresnel lens
| elements that allow us to have compact and light weight
| telephotos. I have a Nikon 300mm lens that weighs 1/5th of its
| predecessor (which I also have) and is 1/3 the length and takes
| better photos. It was well worth the price tag and I greatly
| appreciate this sort of technical improvement if it allows me to
| avoid carrying a tripod for birding.
| gerikson wrote:
| Roger Cicala is probably the best photo gear blogger around these
| days.
| micro_cam wrote:
| There are a couple of other big reasons related to differences
| between film and digital sensors.
|
| First film is much less sensitive to the angle at which light
| strikes it. There are some great, sharp old lens designs from
| leica, zeiss and others that show heavy light fall off in the
| corners on digital sensors. This is a big part of why even f1.8
| or 2 lenses need to be more complicated.
|
| Next film grain itself has sharp edges which effectively sharpens
| images a bit and also limits the resolution and generally has a
| pleasing effect when viewed at high magnification. With digital
| you don't get that and lens flaws get a lot more obvious.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| I have an interchangeable lens camera and multiple lenses. But I
| usually leave these at home when I travel. Camera prices have
| gone down so much, you can do amazing things with minimal gear
| and budget.
|
| Minimal size and weight that still gets the job done is mostly my
| take on this. small specific cameras for the task at hand. I have
| a very similar to this, and it's very compact and gives me
| multiple cameras and angles. Sound quality is often more
| important than video quality anyway. And you can get good video
| quality by just using a tripod and an external mic like the rode
| micro.
|
| 1. g7x (mark iii) f1.8 lens and canon colors for talking head
| videos or pictures. Sony equivalent zv1 would be good too.
|
| 2. sony fdr3000 for walking around. Wide angle, and natural
| looking stabilization. or gopro.
|
| 3. dji mini drone. The only drone that is legal to fly in many
| places.
|
| 4. phone for everything else
|
| 5. Rode video micro (microphone)
|
| 6. Small Tripod (Ulanzi MT-16)
|
| ________
|
| ~1kg and around 1.5k to put together
|
| I actually have more cameras but for Travel I think this is
| ideal. The only thing I would add is possibly a bridge camera
| like lumix fz82 or fz1000 for zooming.
| ben7799 wrote:
| Excellent points, people need to have perspective about high
| value traditional gear in a lot of cases today.
|
| There's a lot of perspective lost on some of this ultra high
| end handheld digital camera gear these days.
|
| A $500-1000 drone can easily be worth $50k worth of ground
| camera for landscape photography for example because it can
| erase massive amounts of effort and barriers to getting a shot.
| The expensive handheld gear can't get the shot period and can
| be wasted money.
|
| I have a DJI Mini and it's a fantastic photo tool, in it's case
| it weighs less than a DSLR/Mirrorless body. A Smartphone or
| very light DSLR Body/Lens kit + the drone can outperform a much
| heavier & more expensive kit for outdoor photography.
| [deleted]
| Matrixik wrote:
| Roger Cicala knows a lot about lenses and pushed lens
| manufacturers to have better testing and quality, he created
| https://www.lensrentals.com/ because he got sick with low quality
| checks of lenses:
|
| _When I started Lensrentals I had a lot of conversations with
| service centers that went like this. Me: "That lens you repaired
| still sucks". Person at service center: "No, it's within specs".
| Me: "What are the specs?" Service center: "We can't tell you".
| One day, after I raised hell with a factory service manager, he
| patted me on the head and said, "testing lenses is complicated;
| you don't have the background to understand."
|
| Any of you who has ever seen a physician after someone says
| something like 'you wouldn't understand; it's complicated' knows
| what happened next. I had no option but to spend a couple of
| years buying testing equipment, offering internships to really
| smart optical engineering students, and developing a lens testing
| center and methodology that was as good as anything in the
| industry._
|
| He is also capable of writing about hard topics in a way that
| most people can understand them.
|
| Anyone interested in camera lenses should read also his previous
| posts https://www.dpreview.com/members/1329131098
| salimmadjd wrote:
| His lens tests are excellent. The lens rentals blog is the best
| place to find them [0]. If you're in market for high quality
| lenses, lens rental blog is a great resource.
|
| I also like cameralabs' lens tests [1]. Not as scientific as
| lensrentals, however, it has real samples and images of charts
| for comparison, so you can get a sense for what the different
| resolution means in image resolution. It also tests things
| beyond resolution. Such as out of focus rendering, coma, sun
| stars, etc.
|
| [0] https://www.lensrentals.com/blog [1]
| https://www.cameralabs.com/camera-lens-reviews/
| subhro wrote:
| He does break down technical stuff is average Joe language.
| But, one this that does tick me off is his lens analysis does
| not consider larger formats.
| [deleted]
| salimmadjd wrote:
| is that because the limitation of his testing insurgents?
| [deleted]
| Andrex wrote:
| Thank you for the LensRentals.com link! I've been using
| BorrowLenses.com and been happy with them, but the more sources
| of equipment the better. LR has a better selection than I
| expected too.
| jcims wrote:
| Couldn't there be a volumetric description of lens focusing
| ability/sharpness/distortion similar to that of the polar
| sensitivity plot of a microphone?
| astrange wrote:
| https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1351719699/roger-cicala-fi...
| _ph_ wrote:
| There is a multitude of practical reasons. First of all, modern
| digital sensors offer resolutions far beyond what normal film
| material would offer. So 35mm cameras easily beat the resolution
| of classical medium format film. You need lenses to match that
| resolution.
|
| Then there are new requirements like AF and optical image
| stabilisation. With classical prime lenses, focussing often would
| move the whole lens forward and backward. Or at least some large
| lens group. That makes the optical construction easier but
| prevents fast AF. Modern lens designs would use a rather small
| lens in the middle for focussing. With the reduced mass, the
| focus speed goes up. Image stabilization also asks for a small
| lens or lens group to be moved.
|
| But one big difference shouldn't be overlooked either: the
| abundance of compute power. Today, you can easily simulate a lens
| system of any complexity. Leica did actually use raytracing to
| optimize their lenses in the 50ies - but in the absence of
| computers, they had a room full of people who did the
| calculations manually. So with a months worth of work, they
| managed to calculate the path of like 5 rays through their given
| lens design. Which had like 6 elements. Modern prime lenses can
| have up to 20 lens elements, zoom lenses up to 30.
|
| For a good comparison about different lens design approaches, one
| should look at Leica lenses. Because Leica both still makes
| classical manual focus lenses for the M system, which typically
| have like 5-7 lens elements, and absolutely modern style lenses
| for their SL system, which have twice or more lens elements. In
| each design philosophy, they are making some of the best lenses,
| cost usually not the top priority :). Which makes a good base for
| comparisons. For example, they quite recently both introduced a
| new 35f2 lens for the M and the SL mount.
|
| Personally, I am quite fond of the prime lenses with few lens
| elements. While modern glass coatings can pretty much eliminate
| reflections on glass surfaces, every single glass-air boundary
| does create reflections. So while the modern designs are
| technically close to perfect, I think those designs with few lens
| elements have a special image rendering. Very contrasty, lots of
| character.
| azhenley wrote:
| I have a collection of 50mm lenses (from the 1950s to 2018). Most
| of my favorite shots are actually taken with the older, imperfect
| ones. Some people call these "character lenses", which have flaws
| that can actually be quite appealing. Most of them are sharp
| enough and the flaws disappear if stopped down a bit.
|
| Examples of flaws include swirly bokeh in the background, a glow
| around high-contrast edges, and flares from lights.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-05-10 23:01 UTC)