I'm finding the 55's extreme sharpness to be a problem (said no one ever on the Internet til now): for specular highlights, like little drops of water on the green moss covered rock, the highlights are all turning different colors instead of staying white, presumably because the demosaic is breaking up or something because the points are so small. Shooting the same scene with the Nikkor 24 PC-E, Zeiss 2/35, and other lenses, I don't see the same thing: the specular highlights are just plain white. This leads to a pretty harsh rendering from the 55 Otus (and the 135 APO as well) that I find visible even on web-sized images like the one above, and I'm starting to really dislike this lens because of it. Has anyone else seen this? I'm going to try to see if a polarizer will tame some of those harsh highlights.
Andre Y wrote:
I'm finding the 55's extreme sharpness to be a problem (said no one ever on the Internet til now): for specular highlights, like little drops of water on the green moss covered rock, the highlights are all turning different colors instead of staying white, presumably because the demosaic is breaking up or something because the points are so small. Shooting the same scene with the Nikkor 24 PC-E, Zeiss 2/35, and other lenses, I don't see the same thing: the specular highlights are just plain white. This leads to a pretty harsh rendering from the 55 Otus (and the 135 APO as well) that I find visible even on web-sized images like the one above, and I'm starting to really dislike this lens because of it. Has anyone else seen this? I'm going to try to see if a polarizer will tame some of those harsh highlights....Show more →
Interesting. Do you have a picture? Sharpness is all about contrast. IMO, coloring highlight is close related to chromatic aberrations. The drop scene could be more complex than we thought. The water drop is acting like a magnifier or a lens and there are reflections. You could have inconsistent results simply by different shooting angle.
phuang3 wrote:
Interesting. Do you have a picture? Sharpness is all about contrast. IMO, coloring highlight is close related to chromatic aberrations. The drop scene could be more complex than we thought. The water drop is acting like a magnifier or a lens and there are reflections. You could have inconsistent results simply by different shooting angle.
Thanks for taking a look, and those are good questions. I can see how different angles of views could cause some of these artifacts. I've taken 2 screenshots of 1:1 views of the areas with this issue. The first is the from the Otus, while the second is from the Nikkor 24 PC-E, both shot in the same area, around the same time. The lighting angles are different, but I wasn't trying to test for this problem and only noticed it later. There is still some of it on the 24mm, but much less than the 55.
@1.4
