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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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-...
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.
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.
It reminded me of a trivia: shows shot in Melbourne gave actors ice to put in their mouths - because everyone knows Australia is always hot and sunny so you can't show the steam of their breath. (when they filmed on a cold day)
In photo studio work we call the continuous (as opposed to strobe) lights hot lights for good reason. I imagine the lighting requirements for film/video isn't too much different. This was ~10 years ago though, don't know how LEDs have changed things.
LEDs help a lot. Partly because the waste less heat but also because IR spectrum is not present in LED light.
I have worked for Canal+ a long, long time ago and I have been on the set couple of times. When the studio was lit you felt hot even though there was air conditioning.
It is basically the same as meeting sunshine on a winter day with no air movement. The air is cold but the sunshine on your skin makes you feel much hotter than it really is.
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.
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...
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.
Well said. I don't think you need to refer to HFR to explain why The Hobbit films look "fake". It's hard to imagine this clip (at 24 fps) looking any worse in HFR: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCswVszTEx0
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"?
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.
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
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.
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.
Mine still has the lag with 'game mode'. It is just a quirk of the thing I bought 10 years ago. It could also be like some of the other commenters are saying maybe the HDMI port I have it does not have the low latency bit but maybe 1 of the 4 does. Have to check again. It was not really a big deal as that is not really the use case for my TV. Which was watching movies :)
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.
I see their point though. Like UAC alerts being a janky experience that forces developers to fix things, watching interpolated 60fps is a janky experience that gets you used to 60fps so you won't react to it with an ingrained stereotype.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 70mm film looks great in 4K though (2001, Nolan movies, etc).
Best to leave modern productions (like Nolan) out of the conversation, IMO. It can give an unrealistic picture of what resolution is achievable. Take Lawrence of Arabia for example: it's possibly the paradigmatic example of a 70mm film, and yet in most scenes the resolution is no better than an upscaled 1080p. This is due to a combination of problems: film stock degrades relatively quickly and was generally of lower quality 50+ years ago than today, and focus pulling was not precise enough to take full advantage of the available resolving power of 70mm film.
Unfortunately this is also true for many scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Take a look at these comparisons here: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?go=1&a=0&d1=12517&d2=12509&s1... You're looking at an upscaled 1080p film versus native 4k (tonemapped to have roughly comparable colors on SDR screens). There's little if any more detail in the 4k image.
I agree with you about HDR though. It's certainly the most important improvement that's come up in the last decade, much more than the resolution increase.
> 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?
Yes and no. The standard for Blu-ray (which uses H.264) is not able to accommodate HDR or 4k, so it was not possible until the release of the UHD Blu-ray standard. Players with the UHD standard support 4k, HDR, and the HEVC codec instead of H.264. HEVC (aka H.265) can support HDR at any resolution, but since you're releasing a "UHD" disc anyway that only people with supporting players can use, you may as well put it on there in 4k anyway. Better for marketing, probably. So it's a bit complicated. If you check bittorrent trackers, you'll probably be able to find 1080p films with HDR (encoded with HEVC), but no one in the industry releases films that way.
(Also, the higher bit depth is not quite as important as the extended dynamic range.)
"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'd especially emphasize the 'tricks you can get away with' in low resolution television. A few months ago I was watching a rerun of an early 1960s B&W sitcom on a TV sub-channel running at normal 1080 HD resolution. The program was My Favorite Martian which is a spoofed up science fiction comedy series. The program features a Martian who can disappear and levitate objects so it's not unusual to see things either moving or floating in midair.
Anyway, the tricks employed to levitate things were embarrassingly obvious in standard HD/1080 resolution as it was dead easy to see that they had been suspended on nylon fishing line. When the show was first aired the most common TV standards were 405, 525 and 625 lines so the series producers were betting that the limiting resolution of these TV systems would hide the lines—which clearly they did. BTW, as a young kid I used to watch the show [on 625 B&W], and if I'd have seen that fishing line then I've made a big deal out of the fact.
Incidentally, the early series were in black & white and filmed on 35mm film which meant the original negatives would have been dazzlingly sharp in comparison to the then TV systems. It's interesting to note the present video quality of this series—unlike so many others from the time—is excellent (and that includes the later color episodes). Clearly, the recent transfer/digitization was done from negatives have been archived well. It's especially obvious in the color series which are of exceptionally good color quality given the passage of time (there's not a trace of fade, cross-coupling of color dyes or color bleed which plagues so many old films).
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.
Basically, we (over the age of about 25 anyway) are used to associating 24 FPS with “high quality” content like movies and higher FPS with cheap content like soap operas.
I'm in my 30s I associate 24 fps with jerky pans and unwatchable action sequences. And if we're talking 2:3 pull down in something that was never intended for theaters, I think, what a pointlessly detrimental affectation.
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.
People here blame it on age, but very high resolution always screams it was shot on video. I don't need to see every pore on an actor's face. I'm usually wanting to get away from reality when watching a movie, or a tv show too.
I am very content with the visual quality film gave us.
I love black, and white film for the same reasons, and others, even more.
They do some real time image processing now, I noticed when I went to a taping of the view. You can see the two screens on the camera (taking during a break). I'm not sure what they're doing exactly.
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.
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
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.
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.
Maybe for outdoor daylight situations. Any indoor or night time shot, fast lens wide open means getting shots that aren’t possible on a phone. Night mode on my phone is fine for still subjects but humans like to move. I guess if they keep adding more cameras to phones, they’ll get enough light to construct a usable image without having a 1 second exposure.
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.
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".
I picked up an old stock 105mm last year, case included. I love how it makes people look, it's a great bridge between vintage and modern lenses.
How do you feel abbout the DC function? I've found R settings don't really focus correctly with AF, so it's best to focus manually. Is that the case with the 135mm version too?
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.
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”).
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).
To add to the sibling comment, it is real. But it's more about the field of view of the lens and the depth of field. As pointed out the light doesn't know the area of the sensor. Depth of field is a matter of the distance from the camera to the subject, the aperture of the lens and the focal length of the lens. Larger formats allow you to stand closer to the subject while retaining a wider view than for a smaller format camera. Take the 80mm f2.8 lens on a Rolleiflex TLR. If you stand where you can frame a head and shoulders portrait, you're standing closer than you would for the same framing on a smaller format camera with an 80mm lens. You would have to stand back further, with the subject further away more is in focus. Have a look at the Brenizer effect for a digitally stitched equivalent of a larger sensor.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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 :).
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.
I rented the 1.2 this winter. It's kinda soft, but the rendering is beautiful. If you're going to work at f/8, the 1.8 STM or 1.4 are both as good or better.
Wide open in heavy snowfall at night, there's nothing I've experienced like it. Not quite life-changing, but it's real good.
Couldn't justify a purchase, but I may have purchased a used 1.4 a month later..... The focus-falloff, rendering, and out-of-focus elements aren't the same, but it's still wonderful in the dark and inexpensive-enough to be replaced if I kill it. Someday, the stars will align and I'll work with a 1.2 again.
My desert-island lens is a (used) 400 f/5.6. Someday I'll try the 100-400, but worry about the telescoping assembly ingesting moisture and dust in the field.
Depends on the lens really, a Super Takumar 50mm f/1.4 will happily compete in sharpness at f/8 (if I take well lit photos with mine it becomes the 24MP sensor that is the limiting factor in detail), but will indeed be significantly less performant at f/1.4. Even a decent Helios 44m will create gorgeous and impressively sharp images.
These lenses stopped down are better more for artistic photography as they have interesting bokeh patterns and lots of character.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Besides that, the main problem with the processing in those cameras is they don't do it to RAW, only to 8-bit JPG, so nothing for HDR displays. iPhone can do fused RAW, 10-bit HEIC, and takes HDR photos and has an HDR display to show them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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 $1500+. But I don't know how much advantage those really give except in specific rare situations.
I disagree. The Panasonic 25mm f/1.7 is equivalent to a 50mm f3.4 on full frame.
For 150g on full-frame you can get a 50mm 1.8, at a cost of 150$ 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.
Whether you should apply crop factor to aperture depends on whether you're interested depth of field, or exposure. You may or may not be able to adjust ISO to get comparable results at 50mm f/3.4 depending on which cameras you're comparing.
Noise is decided by the quality of the sensor, and the solid angle of light that hits each point on the sensor. The solid angle as it happens also decides depth of field.
So it is always true that you should apply crop factor to aperture. ISO is just not the correct factor to describe gain because an inverse crop factor is applied to it in effect.
So at the same exposure and shutter speed, at f/3.4 on FF you will get the same image with the same amount of noise as you would at f/1.7 on M4/3.
You'll have to set ISO higher to get the same image at f/3.4 as you would at f/1.7 on a smaller sensor because the intensity of the light is reduced.
I'm interested to learn more about the effect of light angle on noise. Do you have a source that talks about this? I didn't find anything useful in 2 minutes of searching the web.
No, the intensity of light is not reduced. ISO is not gain. In other words, ISO 200 on full frame is the same as ISO 100 on M4/3 in terms of what actually happens inside the sensor. This is because of how the ISO standard is written.
As for light angle, it's a consequence of the second law of thermodynamics, that translates in optics as the conservation of étendue.
Basically what this means it that the amount of light captured from a light source is equivalent to the solid angle of light from that light source onto the entrance pupil - whose size is the focal length divided by the f number.
So basically, what determines in the same scene how much light is received by the sensor depends on the size of the aperture in milimiters.
So on a sensor of the same efficiency, it's the physical size of the aperture that determines how much light is captured.
The intensity of the light is reduced because the aperture is the same diameter (50/3.4 = 25/1.7), but the light has to cover four times the area. To get the same exposure with double the f number and the same shutter speed will require four times the ISO.
> what determines in the same scene how much light is received by the sensor depends on the size of the aperture in milimiters
That's true, but the amount of light is not the intensity of light.
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.
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.
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.
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
Your intuition is correct but, unfortunately, it’s not simply a convolution.
A great example of this is DiffuserCam [1], which uses a diffuser as a “lens”, combined with a carefully measured point spread function (PSF) of a single point for each axial plane to estimate the “true” PSF that actually varies throughout the entire volume. So although in this work they estimate the reconstruction by making a translational invariance assumption, this is done for practical reasons and quality is lost.
To fully recover a lossless image as you suggest, one would have to measure a PSF for each point in the volume.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
>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... :(
Not just m43s. Sony/Nikon/Canon, I'd assume the rest of the major brands as well nowadays; most frequently for Pincushion and Barrel distortion.
Such corrections are all but essential for affordable zooms, but I'm still split on the potential for over-use in primes. I'll point to the Sony 16/2.8 E as an example; the use of correction in JPEGs is pretty evident compared to shooting raw, and you can see the correction softening the corners.
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.
> 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.
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.
(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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah the Nex-5n with the kit lens was $140 and it was fun to shoot around with. That's what I shoot for primarily other than creating YouTube content is to go outside/be in the park, mostly doing macro since the place I live at sucks landscape wise. But yeah I shoot to have my own wallpaper and that's gotta be 4K res at least.
All my stuff is used, the latest Sony Alpha 1 is $6.5K ha a bit out of my budget.
Anyway the talk of money is bad/pointless, I saw one cinema lens that was $100K like wth... levels in life.
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.
The price floor for a barely-usable car in a US state that doesn't require an inspection to register it is probably around $500, but that can fluctuate as low as $0 (I literally watched a friend give a beat up, but driveable old van to a random construction worker in the apartment complex they were moving out of).
$2000 could easily get a 15 year old Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla or similar compact car with a reputation for longevity, without major issues. Shopping in that price range can, however be risky if you're not mechanically inclined enough to inspect the condition of the car and don't have the aid of someone who is.
A lot of people did recommend Honda Civics, I considered it but they also apparently are at a higher risk of getting stolen too... so I didn't get one.
Most big YouTube photography channels have video descriptions absolutely stuffed with affiliate links. They have a strong incentive to both attract viewers who are already interested in buying gear, and to convince viewers who aren't sure they want more gear that they really do want more gear.
Most people putting out high-production-value videos regularly aren't doing it for fun or to make the world a better place; they're closely watching how much money they make from it.
As an amateur, and speaking at the amateur level, I always find myself disagreeing that with that last statement whenever I see it.
I've used a bunch of cameras ranging from smartphones to high end point-and-shoots all the way up to full frame "prosumer" mirrorless. While I have no doubt someone whose work gets featured in say, NatGeo, can take an iPhone4 and make wonderful shots, I can't help but feel the rest of us Average Joes and Janes get a tremendous boost from having better gear.
And even that NatGeo featured pro would produce much better pictures with a FF DSLR than being limited to a iPhone 4, no?
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
You could make things hard mode for yourself by shooting manual lenses. There are some amazing manual lenses for Sony such as the Voigtlander ones. I personally found it quite fun to shoot digital with modern manual lenses --- the image quality is so good but you still have to work to get it.
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.
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I use the 28-200 Tamron on the A7 III. It is amazing for the price. It's a good size and weight for what it is. It isn't always mentioned online, but it's not bad at macro either. For my purposes it strikes many of the right compromises. Rent it and give it a shot.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
As someone who sometimes shoots medium format film, sometimes shoots digital—I am a bit skeptical about claims that digital “easily beat the resolution of classical medium format film”.
I shoot with a nice, but old, MF camera and prime lens on a tripod and then do wet prints (usually) or drum scans (rarely). Based on close examination of drum scans, I estimate my setup gives images of around 60-80 megapixels. Knock that down somewhat for color. This is a bit lower than the quoted resolution for the film I use, if you read the spec sheet.
Rough comparison of digital vs film leads me to conclude that you can’t just compare the camera resolution against the film scan resolution. Maybe it’s the low-pass filter / Bayer filter, but a film scan will have the same image quality as a raw digital photo of somewhat larger size (say, 50%).
So if you take a high-end full-frame digital camera with a 24x36mm sensor, you get 50 megapixels, and my film setup will get you around the same number of pixels when shooting color, but the film scans will be sharper. The film is 4x the area—56x70mm. So it’s close, and I wouldn’t be surprised if a top-of-the-line full-frame digital camera could beat a 645. But 645 is the smallest of the medium format sizes, and digital wouldn’t be beating it by a huge margin. It’s a bit subjective, because the transfer functions for digital and film are so different and there’s no obvious correct way to compare them mathematically.
That said, digital will easily win at higher ISOs.
My experience mirrors yours. 50MP off of medium format and a flatbed scanner is easy. 1980s lenses look great, even with color film. I have one shot I took off the roof of a building, and you can read street signs many blocks away in the final scan. With 4x5, 100MP is pretty achievable, and even with very "inferior" lenses, the resolution is incredible. I have a picture of the Manhattan Bridge from the Brooklyn side, with the main focus being the bridge... but if you zoom in on the background, you can again read street signs. I love this kind of photo, where you can blow it up to wall size and think "nice" but walk closer and uncover tons of details that you could never see in person. It impresses me every time.
Digital is in an awkward spot where semiconductor yields make larger sensors impractical, so they have to focus on hyper-optimizing lenses. This ends up being very expensive. And, there are diminishing returns; the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get, so there is unfortunately a hard limit. Compare this to a big piece of plastic dipped in some chemicals, and you wonder how much we really benefited from the switch to digital. It's great for the snapshot market, it's great for people that need to produce 1000s of wall-sized photos a day, but for the large middle ground, it feels like technology for technology's sake. (I of course own a DSLR, being very into technology for technology's sake!)
> the wave nature of light introduces interesting artifacts the smaller your pixels get
The particle nature as well. Because light arrival is a poisson process, your pixels need to be big enough that their “backing capacitor”, so to speak, can fit at least a few tens of thousands of electrons for acceptable noise levels.
If your pixel capacitor maxes out at 100 electrons, your SNR will never exceed 10, even under optimal conditions (or, at least, you have to downscale, and then you would be better off with bigger pixels in the first place).
I suspect when people compare digital against film, they often mean the 35mm film or aps size, not something like medium format or larger. Of course, there is hasselblad medium-size digital back, but it is not often seen.
The parent comment explicitly mentioned medium-format.
The point when digital became competitive with medium-format was an important milestone--it's just that if you did events, sports, wildlife, or photojournalism you were probably already on digital.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 £90 used, you can find the 50mm f/1.4 D for a similar price too.
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.
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)
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~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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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?
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.
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That really is a great lens. Versatile as well since on a crop camera it’s a useful focal length too. IMHO the difference with the more expensive lenses is more about durability (a fair trade off since they’re cheap) and handling (easier manual focus, distance markings) than image quality.
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.
Couldn't there be a volumetric description of lens focusing ability/sharpness/distortion similar to that of the polar sensitivity plot of a microphone?
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.
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