Thanks for the great info, TheSuede! I continue to be impressed with your knowledge of optics.
I too have done plenty of large optical prints from 35mm, with great results. I have 16x20s on tech pan that could easily pass for 4x5. I find optical prints done right, always trump any scanned-then-printed results. Adding 2+ more layers of interpolation is never a good thing. A well-aligned enlarger with the best optics can resolve sharp detail right into the very corners of the frame.
FlyPenFly wrote:
As far as CA goes, it's unavoidable in any lens design and for the subject at hand, that was completely uncorrected in LR, I'm sure its pretty acceptable with some correction.
thrice wrote:
Voigtlander 180mm f/4.0 APO-Lanthar - no visible purple fringing under any circumstances at any aperture. At least at 21MP.
It's there. You just can't see it. It's hiding under the image pixels.
Ed Sawyer wrote:
I have 16x20s on tech pan that could easily pass for 4x5.
With all due respect Ed,
I'd love to see that, 4x5 having 15 times the area of 35mm. An equivalent print-size for that magnification from 4x5 would be around 56x85". That's like saying I have images from my Fuji 6mp compact that would pass for the M9 at 8x13 because you're not hitting the resolution limits. There is the matter of dynamic range and tonality.
I agree tech pan is excellent for resolution and small grain, but really? 35mm equalling 4x5? Maybe in detail limited by the printing medium, but in all other respects...
Seems like a great lens but many others beat it for PF including the Nikon 85mm F3.5.
It seems to be a trait of fast lenses used at max or near max apertures. I think just about every modern high end lens ($300+) shows great PF performance when stopped down to F3.5 and below.
Mmmm, I dunno. I'd rather think it had to do with the materials used. Every time I use a fluorite lens I just about can't get it to fringe on me. My copy of the nFD 300/2.8L was the most recent of these. I have 6 or 8 other APO lenses that use fluorite and while some of them are not very sharp, none of them fringe much or at all. Additionally every time I get a lens where the designers fiddled with the material formula I see differing amounts of fringe.
So it's my guess that if there's special elements of materials like fluorite and the other elements of LD glass you'll get less than if the materials are uhhh, less special.
I suppose the corrective design has some to do with it too.
+1 ... ALL optics are design trade-offs. You just gotta 'pick & choose' what to "keep or lose"
That's what makes Alts so interesting, as there is no such thing as the 'perfect lens' (albeit, some get closer than others) ... just maybe perfect for you or your application.
edwardkaraa wrote:
And besides, I don't think any serious photographer would enlarge a 35mm film image beyond 8x10. Anything larger than that has always been in the medium format realm. I guess digital must be lens manufacturers worst nightmare
Edward -- Sorry, I have to strongly disagree. I've had professional labs in the Hollywood area make quite a few nicely detailed landscape, cityscape and architectural prints up to 30x40 inch prints from 4x5 internegs off 35mm Velvia transparencies (also Kodachrome 25). Of course medium format and 4x5 originals are sharper (I used mostly 35mm and 4x5), but these display prints were beautiful off the 35mm.
Much more often, I'd make 16x20 prints for clients off 35mm trans to 4x5 internegs. Cibachrome with its masking was also another method to produce outstanding large prints from 35mm originals.
Naturally, we're talking world-class lab equipment -- the stuff used on JPL's awe-inspiring space photos for museum-type exhibits, not home-hobbyist 4x5 enlargers.
lateral and longitudinal CA are two different things, they don't have a quantitative test for LoCA on photozone.
The Leica 100mm APO-Macro-Elmarit-R might be totally devoid of both at f/2.8, I don't remember for certain but I can't see any of either in the files I have.
Velvia reaches 160lp/mm - if you find a thousandfold reduction of contrast acceptable (why they even bother to specify this is beyond me, since the detail contrast level at that resolution can only be recorded by immersion lithography equipment costing millions of dollars). For a more reasonable transfer function, about 80 is more realistic. Then you "only" have a halving of contrast.
This doesn't mean that you can't get beautiful 2m wide prints out of a 36x24mm transp. But the pure resolving power isn't there.
And yest, most lenses gain about 1.5 Ev of damping of PF per stop of aperture. The damping is partly the diameter going down (by sqrt(2)) and partly a 1Ev lowering of power.
The Leica has almost no LoCA at all - in the plane of focus. It still has oof bokeh fringes. The two aren't necessarily linked - but the chance of a lens having almost no oof bokeh fringes and lots of in-focus LoCA is indeed very, very small.
Full crystal fluorite is no better than the modern ED glasses when it comes to fighting off the PF syndrome. You have just as good a chance of balancing your construction for full spectrum LoCA correction with glass/Fl mixes as pure CaF2. If you get PF with a fluorite or ED glass in the mix, the construction is geared for better correction in a smaller bandwidth. Which option that is better overall - that's up to the designer. Smaller bandwidth generally means cheaper construction and better mounting tolerance margins - and this can actually mean that 90% of the produced lenses perform BETTER than what they would have done if you modeled a "perfect" lens with zero mount tolerances.
There's quite a lot of sample deviation between the super-teles - no matter which brand you choose.
When correctly aligned, a polarizer removes what is usually denominated as "specular" reflections. A specular reflection has taken very little energy absorption from the surface it bounced from, so it basically contains the illuminant light colour and nothing more. It mixes "white" with the colour of the surface.
A skin surface is full of very small specular reflections, if you remove them you get a deeper skin tone, since a smaller percentage of the light reflected from the surface is just "pure white".
A polarizer can also have varying degrees of blocking (and transmitting!) depending on wavelength. So if the polarizing layer blocks red more than the others, you will change the wavelength composition sum of the surface. This changes the average colour.
Gunzorro wrote:
Edward -- Sorry, I have to strongly disagree. I've had professional labs in the Hollywood area make quite a few nicely detailed landscape, cityscape and architectural prints up to 30x40 inch prints from 4x5 internegs off 35mm Velvia transparencies (also Kodachrome 25). Of course medium format and 4x5 originals are sharper (I used mostly 35mm and 4x5), but these display prints were beautiful off the 35mm.
Much more often, I'd make 16x20 prints for clients off 35mm trans to 4x5 internegs. Cibachrome with its masking was also another method to produce outstanding large prints from 35mm originals.
Naturally, we're talking world-class lab equipment -- the stuff used on JPL's awe-inspiring space photos for museum-type exhibits, not home-hobbyist 4x5 enlargers.
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I don't know why we keep on arguing about this, when there is no disagreement. I know you can make detailed prints out of 35mm material. I have been to an exhibition by Yann Arthus Bertrand where all 120x180 cm prints were shot on Velvia 50 and canon 1ds2. The Velvia swept the floor with the 1ds2, not only in resolution, but in color and overall richness. But I wouldn't say the prints wouldn't have benefited from being shot with a larger format. When we know how the photographer worked, hanging most of the time from helicopters, one would forgive him for using this format. But i still stand by my original statement. During the days when I earned my living from taking photos in the late 80s up to mid 90s that was absolutely an unacceptable practice.
Edward -- I suppose we are arguing over a minute detail. For me, it was an accepted practice during the time period you mention, to use 35mm for much commercial work, and making wall-size prints for clients, not limited to 8x10s. I considered myself a "serious photographer" during that time. I'm sure we basically agree, but you have such a categoric and definitive statement, that I felt it needed clarification. Thanks.
Absolutely no problem
We are talking here about different countries and different markets. My statement was about my own market and clients so maybe I should not have generalized. No disagreement for sure
