Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#31

Post by ansible » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:57 PM UTC

sumtechguy wrote: post #23

evandev wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Turn off motion smoothing on your TV. It's also called the "Soap Opera Effect".

What is more fun is the latency those effects add to images. Found that out the hard way playing some twitchy 'have to be just right' on the controls games. In my case it was almost 1/4-1/2 of a second. Even with all of the settings 'off' there is still a decent latency on the screen (down to about 70ms) which is just enough to mess me up on some games but not all.

I've been using a 46in 4K TV as a monitor, and the lag from the video processing felt super odd, until I switched the HDMI input to "game mode".

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#32

Post by ddulaney » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

I would argue that this happened with smartphones. "Real" cameras are generally for people who want to chase that optical precision, but for people who are satisfied with a good-enough post-processing solution will generally be satisfied with their phones.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#33

Post by Miraste » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

tachion wrote: post #30

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

But of course they have - every major smartphone manufacturer is eating the whole consumer camera market alive for quite few years now.

Nobody has done this with a full frame sensor, as far as I know. I'd be interested to see smartphone image processing with a sensor that size.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#34

Post by jaywalk » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

pier25 wrote: post #12

reader_mode wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Have you ever watched an old TV show and despaired how unwatchable it is because of low quality of image? Yes, that's the same thing -- our tastes change. I've had the opposite reaction - I'd watch something I've seen before in 4k remastered or something and it would be a worse experience because the extra details reveal the low quality tricks you can get away with on lower reproduction quality. I've even noticed po…

I'm a 4K HDR fanboy, but IMO most movies shot in 35mm film should remain in 1080p. 70mm film looks great in 4K though (2001, Nolan movies, etc). It's a shame there is no 1080p HDR content. 35mm movies would benefit a lot more of higher color bit depth that higher resolution. Anyone knows if this is a codec limitation?

1080p HDR does exist (video games, mostly) but the lack of it is basically tied to the fact that there are no consumer TVs that can do HDR but not 4K.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#35

Post by EveYoung » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

Isn't that exactly what modern smartphones are doing? I think it's quite impressive what Apple and Google are able to do with clever image processing.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#36

Post by [deleted] » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

[deleted]

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#37

Post by ben7799 » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

I love 50mm lenses but a lot of this stuff is ridiculously academic since photography is artistic & creative in nature.

DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect and just wants validation that they have better photo gear than others.

These new 50mm lenses often defeat the point cause they're enormous, heavy, very expensive, and have little benefit over the slower versions of old lenses since most of the time we don't walk around shooting everything at f/1.0-f/1.4, and when we do we're actually looking for some artistic weirdness.

I've mostly had Canon.. I've owned the old f/1.8, the f/1.4, currently have the newer f/1.8, and have rented the f/1.2.

Even the Canon f/1.2, it's older, and not as big/heavy as some of these more recent ones, but it's already so big it feels silly most of the time compared to the smaller/cheaper ones.

It was useful as a rental for specific scenarios, and the new huge/expensive ones are likewise. They're great though if you're going to compare your gear collection instead of your photographs though.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#38

Post by c0nfused » Mon, May 10, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

I think that market is largely already consumed by phones. For most people, there is no reason to not just use a phone to take picutres.

Once you are in the 2k$ usd lens space the buyer is looking for ultra premium stuff either as an enthusiast buyer or as some one who makes their living that way.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#39

Post by proudfoot » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:00 PM UTC

ajross wrote: post #24

What I don't understand isn't the design of the lenses, which are chasing ever-tightening windows of precision in a competetive market with high margins and discriminating consumers. Of course they're going to be overdesigned. What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution. It's not lossy, at all. Or rather, it's only lossy in the sense that the existing quantization in the sensor is already l…

You're not capturing the rays, you only get where they strike. You can't fix it all computationally.

Secondly, we already do correct distortion and chromatic aberration in software, but this doesn't really make up for loss of resolution that you can't fix. Information is being lost.

Re: Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

#40

Post by proudfoot » Mon, May 10, 2021, 3:01 PM UTC

jdjkckfkrrn wrote: post #11

I had an old metal very well regarded 50 mm prime, 1.4 f. I also had a modern plastic 18-55 mm kit lens, high f (starting at 3.5). But the colors on the modern zoom lens were so much better. Hard to explain, but they just looked better, kind of like a DSLR photo has "better" colors than a phone photo. It was very confusing, I was expecting differences in sharpness maybe, but not in colors.

You can fix the colors in post production.