gdanmitchell
Online
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 Re: After 13 years of all Sony, I'm adding a Nikon body | |
Ross Martin wrote:
gdanmitchell wrote:
aCuria wrote:
Don't dismiss the 20-70 just because of digital correction either. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. What matters is whether the final corrected image is sharp or not.
Yes digital correction causes some sharpness loss, but optical correction ALSO causes sharpness loss!
The question is not specifically to Sony alone these days, when more and more companies are relying on digital correction to allow the manufacture of smaller (and sometimes less expensive) lenses with features not easily available from the old-school lenses that don’t rely on digital correction.
I’ll admit that it can make me a bit uncomfortable, coming from the era when the inate performance of the lens itself was the yardstick, not its performance in conjunction with effective post-processing “corrections.”
But I think it is worth doing a little logical test based on a theoretical scenario.
Imagine two lenses that cover the same range of focal lengths and apertures, where one has corrected “distortions” optically and the other corrects them in post. Imagine that you could make, say, 30” x 40” prints from both of them and in the end, after the corrections were applied, we could not come to an agreement that the final image from one is better than the final image from the other. Further imagine that the lens relying on digital post corrections is smaller and lighter.
What would be the photographic reasons for choosing one lens over the other?
- - -
Also, regarding the following:
Why would I compare my lens to a lens that has less than 50% of the focal range? Goofy!
Think hard. You’ll figure it out. ;-)
My experience agrees with what you are saying, Dan. Software distortion correction is here to stay, but not a limiting factor for making art. For example, two lenses I happily put thousands of images through in the past, the Nikon Z 24-120 has a whopping uncorrected barrel distortion of 5% at 24mm (PhotographyLife test) and the Nikon Z 24-70/2.8 a more modest 3.47% at 24mm. But what matters is the final corrected result, especially for me in print form since that is my standard, and I really don’t think I nor anyone who has visited my home gallery has been able to see any negative effect in the prints from those two lenses, nor from any prints made from my current Sony system. But it makes good fodder for arguing on forums 
We're on pretty much the same page here, I think. A lot of folks who go on and on (often in hyperbolic, black-and-white terms) about the theoretical differences between different models, brands, and types of gear would do well to check their biases against actual photographs, preferably large prints. I know that doing so has disabused me of some of the odd forumtography notions that I believed early on.
There's nothing quite like exhibiting in a show that includes beautiful prints made with everything from primes to zooms, film to digital, new to old gear, and formats ranging from MFT to LF to refocus things.
I still have a sticky old bias towards high quality, neutral lenses that don't require a ton of digital correction... but I also leaned that a lot of the theories about the awful effects of such corrections don't generally play out in the final results.
Since I'm here to scope out the world of Sony, with a possible (OK, likely... maybe even "almost certain") move to the brand before too long, I'm interested in both the more traditional options and those that may rely more on digital corrections, and how good photographers (based on your work, I include you in the group) use the gear.
|
