[pure-silver] Re: "Leica Photography" Is Dead. Leica Killed It.
- From: "Richard Knoppow" <dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 23:53:24 -0700
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jean-David Beyer" <jeandavid8@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, March 11, 2014 4:55 PM
Subject: [pure-silver] Re: "Leica Photography" Is Dead.
Leica Killed It.
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.
Kenneth Meese showed similar curves in a couple of his
early books. I think the photos were actually faked but the
effect is certainly real. Lens designers can make certain
compromises in their designs to balance higher order
aberrations so that the MTF curve will vary in a certain
way. It is quite possible to have one lens which appears
visually very sharp but does not have the resolution of
another lens that appears flat. There are other balances
that designers make that affect the subtle character of a
lens. So many think that a lens with maximum spacial
frequency response (highest resolution of fine detail) is
the superior one that its sometimes hard to convince them
that it may not be for many applications.
--
Richard Knoppow
Los Angeles
WB6KBL
dickburk@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
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