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Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

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

#121

Post by dheera »

dylan604 wrote: post #113
dheera wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>and horribly difficult to focus. >I don't use autofocus, pretty much ever, so that isn't a consideration. But it is a consideration. Modern lenses are all designed for autofocus bodies. Yes, you can flip them into manual, but it is still a manual adjustment on a gear designed for computer control. A decent manual focus lens will typically have 270 degress of motion in the filter ring allowing much better control for…

> I do a fair bit of astrophotography

Interesting viewpoint! I do a lot of astrophotography and I found AF-capable lenses to just not work for me at all because a couple of shakes and some play in the gears would slop the lens out of focus, and the short throw and lack of infinity precision make it really hard.

For astrophotography I just love being able to focus on a star and either calibrate the lens stop to be at infinity, or slap some gaffers tape and it's good for at least 2 months until the night temperature outside changes significantly.

Of course, yes, sharpness is an issue for many older lenses, but the better ones of the 70s and 80s have very decent IQ. Honestly I just wish modern lens manufacturers would make more manual focus lenses. Laowa, Samyang, and Zeiss are all awesome for continuing that tradition.

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

#122

Post by Scene_Cast2 »

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…

There are "Light field cameras" that try to capture lightfields / light flux. However, their ray angular resolution isn't anywhere enough to really do too much fun stuff.

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

#123

Post by pier25 »

dylan604 wrote: post #119
pier25 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

35mm -> 4K can look amazing in terms of color, but I've yet to see a film where the added detail is not mostly film grain (exaggerated by sharpening). Do you have a good example?

This was the point of the type of film stock used. The film grain is why pretty much everyone will wince when you ask to do a 16mm->4K. Hell, 16mm->HD was rough. I don't have any examples on hand. But with large amount of time I have found myself with over the past year to watch a lot of content, I too have noticed even some of the last episodics to be shot on film (2005-2010 range) are very noticeable. I have also s…

Another point to consider is that many 4K 35mm movies, are actually upscaled from 1080p or 2K scans.

Here's a good list to check whether a film is real 4K or not.

https://www.digiraw.com/DVD-4K-Bluray-ripping-service/4K-UHD...

I've now remembered that the X-Men films from 20 years ago did look pretty good in 4K HDR. And apparently they are "real 4K". Also the 4K remaster of The Fifth Element.

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

#124

Post by t-writescode »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #42
patorjk wrote: post #15

My Nikkor 50mm 1.8G is one of my favorite lenses. When I had a cropped sensor DSLR I used it as my portrait lens, and when I upgraded to a full frame I started using it as a general purpose lens. It creates beautiful images. I've always been curious about the versions with a lower f-stop, but the price always makes me think twice.

I came so close to buying this lens when I got a Nikon D750 last fall. I'm not really a photographer, but I was unsatisfied with the images coming out of my phone, and if I was going to get a dedicated camera, I wanted to go "all the way", so to speak. But the problem with 50mm prime lenses is they all seem to lack image stabilization. (The one exception I could find, a 45mm from Tamron[1], has bad chromatic aberrati…

An old rule of thumb when it comes to image stabilization needs is that you should be able to hand-hold the lens at 1/focal length without too much loss.

That's 1/50 for a 50mm 1/200 for a 200mm, etc.

For everything else, there's a tripod.

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

#126

Post by magicalhippo »

diarrhea wrote: post #59
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…

Yes, pretty much. I loved my low-range Canon gear (100D, Sigma lenses). When the Sony a7R3 came out, I got it alongside an array of GM lenses. My God do they blow everything out of the water. It's an insane kit. The best part is the great autofocus of the body; even in low light, even in rapid movement, even in burst shots. Among 1000 shots, I can count focus misses on one hand. However , the entire thing feels artif…

I watched a couple of movies back to back this weekend, and it was so striking the difference in quality. One was a middle-budget movie from the 70s, the other a recent lower-budget indie (well I imagine, three actors and one location).

The movie from the 70s had so many out of focus shots, tracking shots were a bit hit or miss and colors were rather poor (mostly just flat but also color balance issues between scenes).

The modern indie movie looked almost like any triple-A movie, with crisp focus, smooth tracking and with lovely natural colors, even in low light.

Not like it came as a surprise as such, but just the back to back experience highlighted the contrast. Really made me sit and appreciate the technological advances.

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

#127

Post by dekoruotas »

dheera wrote: post #114
dekoruotas wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately these are now nearly impossible to find without spending silly money... Where did you acquire yours?

Several from old grannies and grandpas selling stuff on Craigslist, a couple from the MIT Swapfest and other flea markets, some from the FredMiranda and MFLenses Buy&Sell forums. A few from eBay, some good deals pop up every now and then if you're patient for a few months and set up notifications based on keywords rather than thinking "I need this lens right now". Sometimes if you see an auction on eBay with a high s…

Such a great answer! Thank you. I've just bought a Planar 50/1.7 last month and can't wait for the scanned negs to come back any minute now.

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

#128

Post by dylan604 »

dheera wrote: post #121
dylan604 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and horribly difficult to focus. >I don't use autofocus, pretty much ever, so that isn't a consideration. But it is a consideration. Modern lenses are all designed for autofocus bodies. Yes, you can flip them into manual, but it is still a manual adjustment on a gear designed for computer control. A decent manual focus lens will typically have 270 degress of motion in the filter ring allowing much better control for…

> I do a fair bit of astrophotography Interesting viewpoint! I do a lot of astrophotography and I found AF-capable lenses to just not work for me at all because a couple of shakes and some play in the gears would slop the lens out of focus, and the short throw and lack of infinity precision make it really hard. For astrophotography I just love being able to focus on a star and either calibrate the lens stop to be at…

Yes, I've always focused manually for astrophotography, and it always results in a series test images. Even using the live view at 10x, there is still room for improvement even though it is a good start. It's always a take pic, zoom all the way in on preview, and then make adjustments from there.

I would buy an entire kit if they would release modern glass with 100% manual including aperture. There are places that will rehouse your lens so that it is full manual. The cost pretty much doubles the cost of the lens, but I have been tempted to do that for the 70-200.

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

#129

Post by 91aintprime »

jclardy wrote: post #7
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 had this experience watching the Hobbit in high frame rate - it felt like I was watching a play, a bunch of actors on a stage.

The same effect can be great for sports, animal videos, and documentaries.

I would describe the effect of HFR as pushing immersion past suspension of disbelief into reality. You can no longer see them as characters, you see them as you would as if it wasn't through a screen - as you said, like watching actors on a stage.

Fortunately(?), humans may get used to HFR as we have with previous advancements in video technology. Remember when people were freaking out about 4K, 3D, HD, Color, "The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station"?

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

#130

Post by 91aintprime »

crazygringo wrote: post #99
proudfoot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> You can't fix it all computationally. Can't you? If you're dealing with known hardware, then you can apply a deconvolution. Blurring can literally be undone, people do it all the time. It's harder when you have to estimate the kernel, but much easier when you already know the lens's exact properties. Also when you apply it directly to RAW data. So not exactly sure which information you're referring to you when say…

Some blurring is like pixelization
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