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 Re: Digital-Picture review ZE 100 MP lens | |
gdanmitchell wrote:
denoir wrote:
gdanmitchell wrote:
Finally, thank you melcat for your follow-up regarding \"Zeiss colors\" and \"drawing style,\" and for your successful though subtle take-down of a post typical of some who think that by using sophisticated and technical sounding but meaningless terminology their arguments will acquire more legitimacy - and who imagine that no one sees right through them. I had a laugh over his suggestion that I should go read about MTF in much the same way that you probably enjoyed pointing out the irrelevance of the link.
I\'ve always found it amazing that there are people that take pride in ignorance...
Of all the things I take pride in, ignorance is not one of them.
I stand by what I wrote about that original post, and more importantly about the obsession with \"perfect gear\" in ways that are irrelevant to producing photographs. I am most certainly not \"ignorant\" of technical issues related to photography, all the way from lenses and cameras through the printing process. I do, on the other hand, eschew the \"equipment fetish\" business, particularly when it becomes a distraction from producing photographs.
By training and long experience I am familiar with this affectation in areas other than photography. For example, in music you will find people who are absolutely obsessed with owning the \"best\" audio systems and who will invest tons of money it obtaining the supposed best - and who will argue at great length about which thing is better. They even use the same sort of pretentious terminology we find among people with a comparable relationship with photographic equipment.
When compact disks first came out, some professional musician friends and I went to one of the stores that caters to these people do discuss CD players. This was back in the time when the technology was first available. You could get a CD player for perhaps a bit less than $200 or you could spend several thousand dollars for an audiophile player. We\'ll never forget the audiophile techie at the store telling us, people who did music for a living, that we should prefer multi-thousand dollar vinyl disk players because CD systems clearly exhibited \"digital glare.\" Barely suppressing our laughter, we left.
I had another friend whose business was doing on-site live recording of professional classical performances. He used to tell the story of audiophiles being duped into buying something called \"Wonder Solder.\" Apparently the story was that if you de-soldered components in your audiophile system that had been constructed using \"normal\" solder and then re-soldered with \"Wonder Solder\" that you would achieve a wonderful \"expansion of the sound stage\" and other such hoo-hah. At this point in the story he would begin to laugh uncontrollably.
The double-irony is that very few real musicians give a damn about the supposed high end best audiophile gear, at least beyond the point at which a) performance is very good indeed, and b) any differences are trivial or completely irrelevant to their experience of hearing recorded music. The \"triple-irony\" is that the ability to distinguish (or imagine you can distinguish) among such technical differences in machinery is just about wholly unrelated to the ability to \"hear\" and understand music, much less produce it with technical and aesthetic power.
Photography is little different. The majority of excellent photographers do care about the quality of our equipment, as measured by the extent to which it allows them/us to achieve our goal of producing excellent photographs. But while many of them find test results interesting and informative, they understand the context for this in ways that the equipment obsessives seem not to. If you think that the differences in image quality between, say, this vaunted (and no doubt excellent) Zeiss lens and, say, the Canon 100mm macro will actually be visible in your photographic work, I say go for it.
On the other hand, it often seems like a sorry distraction when people get so wrapped up in which lens provides some tiny (and often mystical) increment of \"difference\" in some way that may or may not be measurable... when the same energy applied to actual photography with a wide range of appropriate equipment could make an actual, visible difference in the work they produce.
denoir wrote:These are not subtle differences. They are massive. If you can\'t see them then you should probably not bother with color photography.
a. I\'ll let my photographs and the response they engender in viewers determine whether I \"should not bother with color photography,\" rather than imagining that an ability to read test charts (which I can do) or laboriously compare side by side image (which I can do as well) has any bearing on ones abilities as a photographer.
b. You still seem to be largely missing my basic point.
c. You have a strange notion of the meaning of \"massive.\"
Take care,
Dan
There is a LOT of snake oil in high-end audio. And all sorts of nonsense about quantum smoothing digital interconnects and so on. That said different speakers and headphones sure can sound one heck of a lot different. Compare iPod earbuds to Monster Audio Beats headphones to Grado SR80 to AKG K701 and you\'ll EASILY, EASILY notice the difference (and likely notice that the Monster Audio Beats cost as much or even far more than others sounding better).
And, surprisingly, even something as basic as what opamps you use in your custom sound card do make a difference.
But then again yeah $5000 per foot cables or even $50 per foot it 99.9% nonsense. To be honest, as long as you get the proper gauge home depot copper house wiring it\'ll sound 99.9% like some $$$$ cable. And I especially love how even for digital interconnects where you are just passing a specific say DTS-HD MA programmed compressed bit sequence you read about how some \'special\' cable noticeably brightens up the mid-range and delivers the richest, deepest, most powerful base possible. Hah I mean come on what you tell me the cable does signal processing and knows how to decode digital signals and alter the output, utterly laughable! If they did anything at all other than decompress and re-encode the formats then the signal wouldn\'t even play since it would no longer be in the proper format for the decoder to recognize!
And yet mags go on about how some digital interconnect does this or that!
And differences between lenses are often readily apparent, although it does depend. Even something as basic as tamron 70-300 VC at 300 vs 70-200 f/4 IS + TC vs 70-300 IS vs 70-300L vs 300 2.8 IS vs 120-300 sigma all at 280-300 definitely give images that look different. But yes, yes, of course a great subject, shot well with an average lens probably makes for more drama than a boring subject, shot poorly with the best lens ever made.
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