[pure-silver] Re: "Leica Photography" Is Dead. Leica Killed It.
- From: Jean-David Beyer <jeandavid8@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 19:55:28 -0400
On 03/11/2014 05:12 PM, bobkiss @caribsurf.com wrote:
> Well I, for one have used Nikkor lenses and Leitz lenses side by
> side for decades and found that the Leica Sumicron 50 mm lens is
> amazingly sharp but it is more than that. Most people forget about low
> frequency MTF (or OTF if speaking only of the lens) which we mere
> mortals refer to as "contrast" of a lens. I shot the same film (first
> Tri-x then T-max 400) and developed the film from both cameras in the
> same developing line, often side by side in a basket. The tonal
> gradation from that Sumicron had subtlety and separation I have NEVER
> seen with any of the 8 Nikkors I own.
A professional photographer I use to know normally photographed her
personal work in black and white with a 35mm Leica. And she made her
money shooting mostly advertising in color with a Nikon. But she ran a
comparison because of the never-ending argument over which companies
lenses were better, and she could not decide, not because they were so
close, but because they were different. (I may get what follows
backwards, but you should get the idea.)
The Leica lenses had higher resolution (if you tested that), the the
Nikon lenses looked sharper. She could not account for that, not being a
lens designer. Someone else tested two lenses, one from Leica and
another from Nikon. They had similar focal length and maximum aperture.
It was quite clear what was going on, and also clear why this argument
will never be settled.
If you look at the modulation transfer function of the two lenses, they
are quite different. The Nikon lens MTF and the Leica MTF lens both
started (at the low spacial frequency end) about the same. As the
spacial frequency went up, the Leica lens started gently falling, where
the Nikon stayed high. At a somewhat higher spacial frequency, the
height of the MTF of the Nikon came down quite sharply, where the Leica
lens was still fairly nigh. In other words, Nikon traded off the high
spacial frequency in order to get better results in the medium spacial
frequency range. Perhaps this makes sense with 35 mm cameras because it
makes the images look sharper. And Leica decided the other way. They
traded off the MTF in the medium spacial frequency range in order to get
some response at higher spacial frequencies. I wish I could find those
MTF curves.
--
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