gdanmitchell
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Gunzorro wrote:
My point in describing sharpness is that it should show fine detail throughout the image for a lens to be called "sharp". I know I'm going against the grain, fighting a losing battle of emotionally charged semantics, but just thought I'd show where I'm coming from. (Perhaps twilight and architectural photography saps one's soul?) 
When it comes to my prints, I think I'm pretty much as careful about "sharpness" as anyone else, and perhaps more careful and critical than some.
I have nothing against a sharp lens. I have some that are exceptionally sharp, particularly when used in the ways I typically use them. That said, a few observations about sharpness:
- Quite a wide range of lenses can produce really, really excellent sharpness in large prints. While you might be able to detect some small differences among them if you switched back and forth between 100% magnification crops on your monitor and looked very carefully, it is very rare for such differences to be detectible in, say, a 20" x 30" print.
- With this in mind, in most cases making "sharpness" the most important (or the only!) parameter when selecting a lens is not only relatively pointless, but it can lead to giving up useful things (like flexibility, or size/weight, or your money!) that could end up not being unimportant. Up to a point, sharpness is very important - no one wants a fuzzy lens - but once you get to the realm of "they are all sharp" it is time to look past the search for the Holy Sharpest Lens and instead look for the lens that works best for you.
- If you don't regularly make very large prints and if you don't regularly work carefully from the tripod with remote release and all the rest, this small increment visible-at-100% differences end up being swamped by other factors that affect sharpness. Camera stability, accuracy of AF or MF, choice of aperture, air movement, waiting for camera/lens to settle before shooting, and other factors end up having a more significant effect, especially if you are pushing the upper boundaries of print size.
- Eventually, if you are regularly pushing those upper print size boundaries with full frame DSLR gear, if you really want more system resolution it will make more sense to move to a larger format than to keep trying to squeeze incremental gains out of the smaller format. And, yes, this comes along with its own set of tradeoffs - cost, flexibility, and more.
Dan
BTW: We see a whole range of strange "which is sharpest" threads in forums. One that always gets my attention is the "help me pick the sharpest 70-200mm zoom" threads. The fact of the matter is that all of them are very, very sharp and that this is a great example of a situation in which sharpness is probably just about the least important decision point.
BTW: Yes, your Contax/Zeiss lens really does produce a very sharp image.
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