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Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

dpreview.com

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

#81

Post by ben7799 »

hrktb wrote: post #78
ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

Would you make the same line of comment on a anandtech chipset review, arguing it's ridiculously technical and doesn't take into account the art of progamming ? I am pretty glad dpreview does these kind of technical reviews, it nicely completes other photographer reviews who'll dig more on the experience and real world impact side of things.

The think with an Anandtech chipset review is the faster chipset doesn't have big negatives unless power consumption is a major concern.

The excessive weight of these modern 50mm lens can be a real detriment to getting better photographs. It makes you less mobile, and you can only carry so much weight. If you're carring 10x more weight for your 50mm lens than an older design that is 95% as high quality you inevitably have to leave something else out of the pack.

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

#82

Post by ben7799 »

Sharlin wrote: post #73
ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

> 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. To be fair, the author of this article is Roger Cicala of LensRentals fame [1]; optical testing is his bread and butter. He's also the first to point out that optimal lens performance is neither necessary nor sufficient for good photography, and is famousl…

I'm not trying to pick on Roger he writes well and his stuff is way higher quality than most DPReview content.

He rents lenses, and a big point of what I'm saying is these fancy lenses are very often specialist tools that are much better to rent from someone like him occasionally when you need something very special, but that doesn't make them better items to own vs the less expensive & smaller/lighter 50mm lenses.

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

#83

Post by ajross »

proudfoot wrote: post #39
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.

That's the point though: the quantization absolutely introduces errors, but there were there to begin with. You're comparing the computed result of my "cheap camera" not with its competitor's sensor output but with the hypothetical focal plane of the competitor's lens. And that's wrong, because the competitor has pixels too.

The error you get out is of the order of the sampling error you put in. That's true of all lenses.

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

#84

Post by jk7tarYZAQNpTQa »

cratermoon wrote: post #48
ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

> 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. DPReview, FStoppers, PetaPixel, and back in before the web the Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines. There's a big market for prosumer gear that costs a lot, has ideal technical specs, and hangs around the owner's neck like a prize. Of cour…

A while ago I read a comment that was really eye opener: most big YouTube photography channels out there are mostly about gear, not about "taking pictures". It shows how much money the industry moves (or how prevalent GAS is).

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

#85

Post by Matrixik »

Roger Cicala knows a lot about lenses and pushed lens manufacturers to have better testing and quality, he created https://www.lensrentals.com/ because he got sick with low quality checks of lenses:

When I started Lensrentals I had a lot of conversations with service centers that went like this. Me: "That lens you repaired still sucks". Person at service center: "No, it’s within specs". Me: "What are the specs?" Service center: "We can’t tell you". One day, after I raised hell with a factory service manager, he patted me on the head and said, “testing lenses is complicated; you don’t have the background to understand.”

Any of you who has ever seen a physician after someone says something like ‘you wouldn't understand; it’s complicated’ knows what happened next. I had no option but to spend a couple of years buying testing equipment, offering internships to really smart optical engineering students, and developing a lens testing center and methodology that was as good as anything in the industry.

He is also capable of writing about hard topics in a way that most people can understand them.

Anyone interested in camera lenses should read also his previous posts https://www.dpreview.com/members/1329131098

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

#86

Post by dheera »

ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

I love my Contax Zeiss Planar 50/1.4. It's small and compact, feels like a precision instrument, has lovely rendition, is sharp as a tack in the center at f/2 and sharp corner-to-corner at f/4, built like a tank, has a super long focus throw for precision focusing, and cheaper than most equivalent modern lenses.

It's perhaps my second most frequently used lens, after the 28/2 "Hollywood" Distagon (which isn't really all that sharp off-center, and sports very strong vignetting, but produces a beautiful, dramatic quality).

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

#87

Post by ISL »

dheera wrote: post #74
dylan604 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Canon's L-series (red bands) have metal casings. The glass is also nicer, the barrels are rated much higher for dust/moisture protection. This is reflected in their much higher price tags.

I tried a couple L lenses and they were plastic, felt cheap as fuck, and horribly difficult to focus. Even tried a 50mm f/1.2 L and returned it within an hour of unboxing it. That thing, despite costing 3X as much, felt like a cheap toy in comparison to a Rokkor 58/1.2 or a Nikkor 50/1.2 (both of which are 1/3 of the price in perfect condition), and at the end of the day I still liked the rendition and hand feel of m…

Many of the Ls are metal on the inside. A tough lightweight plastic shell can have major advantages (lighter, impact resistance, etc.)

For a great example of a sharp modern L, check out the 16-35 f/4 IS. I'm not an ultra wide photographer by nature, but that lens impresses me each time it is called-upon.

Choosing lenses, in the long run, is such a personal choice. My favorite first came to market in the early 1990s (and spent this morning with it) -- glad you have found good fits, too :).

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

#88

Post by bayindirh »

ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

> DPreview largely seems to write for the crowd that doesn't even care about the art aspect...

As a hobbyist photographer and a reader of DPReview, I can tell that you can find what you're looking for. There also guys who are in for the art, in for the studio photography or just for gear.

These kind of technical articles makes me happy and piques my interest deeply, because I love to know how things work, and why they're designed this way.

I'm personally aware that better gear makes my photography better, however I love to know theoretical capabilities and limits of my gear. Understanding my gear made my photography better and DPReview's both articles and forums helped me a lot TBH.

For the most light and scenarios, f2.8 is very suitable from my experience, esp. with latest generation of sensors (A7III, Z6/7, etc.), however in extreme dim light (I shoot tango dancing, BTW), f1.8 is really helping. Since you're away from subjects too, DoF becomes very acceptable too.

I agree that unless you've a specific need, f1.4 and f1.2 lenses are halo products. As a Sony shooter, that 2.5/40mm lens [0] is very compelling for street photography from perspective.

At the end of the day, new lenses are giant leaps when compared to older ones in terms of resolution and sharpness. Older lenses indeed have character but, newer ones are not always devoid of it.

[0]: https://www.sony.com/electronics/camera-lenses/sel40f25g

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

#89

Post by jgalt212 »

cratermoon wrote: post #48
ben7799 wrote: post #37

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 versio…

> 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. DPReview, FStoppers, PetaPixel, and back in before the web the Popular Photography and Modern Photography magazines. There's a big market for prosumer gear that costs a lot, has ideal technical specs, and hangs around the owner's neck like a prize. Of cour…

slight correction:

In good light, great photographs can be taken with any camera.

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

#90

Post by bostik »

reader_mode wrote: post #4
lmilcin wrote: post #3

I have a bunch of full frame lenses. Recently I looked at some very old ones I haven't used in a long time. I thought they are faulty (soft). After some diagnosing I found that it is not the fault of lenses but rather in the meantime I have started looking at images at 1:1 in Lightroom and gotten used to ridiculously sharp images from new cameras. Have you ever watched an old TV show and despaired how unwatchable it…

>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…

Hah. I've had that experience but with sound.

Long time ago, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and AMD K8 was the pinnacle of technology, I invested in a basic home theater setup. A decent AV receiver, a subwoofer, two studio-quality monitor speakers. A friend warned me that the speakers I had picked were "crisp, but unforgiving".

All of a sudden DVDs sounded wonderful. The audio tracks in TV programmes became clear. The warnings made no sense.

Until I watched a classic TV show episode from 1980's. Bad mixing. Flipped stereo channels. Stuffy voiceovers. Everything sounded ... wrong.

Suddenly, it all made sense. I understood.

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