gdanmitchell Offline Upload & Sell: Off
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Jeff Rogers wrote:
Thanks. I have always heard (back in the film days) that 35 mm lenses are actually sharper than MF lenses. Not sure if that is true and I have no experience with testing that.
That is a very interesting subject.
Many FF lenses are extremely sharp, for sure. And some older true MF lenses are less sharp when measured on a line-pair-per-millimeter (lp/mm) basis.
However, there is something else to consider as you try to make sense of this. I refer to it as "system resolution," though maybe something like format-related resolution would also make sense.
Let's say that a lens resolves Y lines per millimeter of detail. Oh the horizontal axis (leaving out some variables to keep this simple), on a 36mm wide FF system an image could resolve y times 36 lines. However images made on a 33 x 44 system with the same lens (again, simplifying a bit) could resolve Y times 44 lines.
So the larger format can resolve more detail in the overall frame than in a smaller format with the same lens.
Of course, there are lots of other things to weigh here. How well does the lens perform in the far corners of that larger image? If the FF system already produced very good results (and it certainly can) will I actually see any real world difference in the photographs I create? What else might I have to give up to get this increases resolution — system speed, size/weight, cost, lens availability?
In the end, the important question is not necessarily "is A sharper than B?" This is especially true if both A and B are quite sharp enough, at which point other factors are really way more important considerations.
Dan
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