Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why are modern 50mm lenses so damned complicated?

dpreview.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 291 posts

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

#181

Post by ben7799 »

dukeofdoom wrote: post #118

I have an interchangeable lens camera and multiple lenses. But I usually leave these at home when I travel. Camera prices have gone down so much, you can do amazing things with minimal gear and budget. Minimal size and weight that still gets the job done is mostly my take on this. small specific cameras for the task at hand. I have a very similar to this, and it's very compact and gives me multiple cameras and angles…

Excellent points, people need to have perspective about high value traditional gear in a lot of cases today.

There's a lot of perspective lost on some of this ultra high end handheld digital camera gear these days.

A $500-1000 drone can easily be worth $50k worth of ground camera for landscape photography for example because it can erase massive amounts of effort and barriers to getting a shot. The expensive handheld gear can't get the shot period and can be wasted money.

I have a DJI Mini and it's a fantastic photo tool, in it's case it weighs less than a DSLR/Mirrorless body. A Smartphone or very light DSLR Body/Lens kit + the drone can outperform a much heavier & more expensive kit for outdoor photography.

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

#182

Post by Andrex »

Matrixik wrote: post #85

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?" Serv…

Thank you for the LensRentals.com link! I've been using BorrowLenses.com and been happy with them, but the more sources of equipment the better. LR has a better selection than I expected too.

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

#183

Post by ConceptJunkie »

stormbrew wrote: post #69
NikolaNovak wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second that; Hobbit in particular seemed like a mid-budget British made-for-TV show. I get that it's all psychological, that I'm used to deliberate Hollywood motion-blur look... but I still couldn't bear it. But clearly we learned something or there was something special about Hobbit, because that hasn't necessarily been my experience with all 4k / high-frame shows or movies...

I think to a large extent people overestimated how much this feeling, specifically in the Hobbit films, came from the high frame rate vs. how much came from other artistic, creative, and budget choices they made. I saw them in both normal frame rate and HFR as they were coming out and it looked kinda low-budget, weirdly lit/color corrected, and generally just clunkier than the LotR films did in the moment.

It didn't help that the movies were way more CGI-heavy and cartoony compared to the LotR movies.

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

#184

Post by lmilcin »

foldr wrote: post #153
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…

Old lenses are generally fine when stopped down to sensible apertures in my experience. What’s new is the expectation that lenses should be ultra sharp wide open. Expensive lenses are a very niche enthusiast market now, so the design criteria aren’t especially rational. An exception would be old kit zooms from the film era, which really are awful, since they were designed for people who rarely even went up to 8x10 pr…

Half of reason I even bother with full frame is wide open.

Any smartphone these days can give perfectly good sharp photos. I lug the beast around to get shots you can't get with a smartphone.

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

#185

Post by 0-_-0 »

evandev wrote: post #6
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…

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

Or keep it turned on and get used to it so we can all finally start enjoying high frame rate video!

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

#186

Post by gerikson »

tachion wrote: post #43
Miraste wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There is fairly new Zeiss camera that implemented the whole "camera OS" with Android and even included mobile Lightroom editing capabilities. I guess it's as close as it gets right now. My theory is that the main Japanese companies are extremely conservative and they don't pick up such changes easily - see how Canon and Nikon completely missed mirrorless and suffered huge market loss to Sony.

Nikon made a mirrorless camera series (Nikon 1) that was very capable (the on-sensor AF was great). But they chose a 1" sensor (2.7x crop)

Canon's M-series was similar, they didn't go all in on "pro" features, instead focussed on a consumer market that was shrinking rapidly.

The problem wasn't the technology, the problem was the fear of cannibalizing their own DSLR sales.

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

#187

Post by kergonath »

breischl wrote: post #167
kergonath wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Average photographers can certainly benefit from better gear to a degree. But for many people (myself included) a $300 lens will work as well (or even better) than a $3000 one. Which I think is the point the original commenter was making. I agree somewhat, which is why I mostly use a cheap lens, and an ancient EOS 60D. However, I think the $3,000 lens is a red herring. The vast majority of lenses sold are kit lense…

The expensive lenses are usually big and heavy. If you don't need that degree of sharpness, then it's potentially a worse tool than a lighter (and cheaper) lens. >So why wouldn't they be called "hobbyist photographers" like the rest of us? I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my previous comment. Basically if you're in it for the love of the gear rather than to make photographs that's fine, but your hobby i…

> I feel like I explained my thoughts on that in my previous comment.

Yes, you did. Sorry, it shouldn't have sounded so personal. My real problem is with the community in general.

> Basically if you're in it for the love of the gear rather than to make photographs that's fine, but your hobby is collecting rather than photography.

The thing is, it is a spectrum between pinhole photographers and gear heads. There are different optima for different people along the way, but fundamentally they all do the same thing: taking pictures. So where do you draw the line, and who gets to choose who is branded a legitimate photographer instead of some weirdo with too much money?

I have never seen any evidence that "collectors" (in the sense of people who buy modern gear without taking any picture with it; there are plenty of legitimate collectors of old cameras) really are that common, or any more common than soccer moms who buy a camera to collect dust. Every time they are mentioned it is as bogeymen on a photography forum. It is puzzling that a community would show so extreme sentiments towards one of its subsets. And I am a railway modeller, so I am not stranger to strongly opinionated hobbyists.

> And a fair number of people get taken in reading the gearhead commentary and end up buying expensive lenses that won't actually help that person take better photos.

Sure, that is a problem for some people who are eager to give themselves the right tools and get to overspend. And to be honest most of us are willing to fall into that trap.

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

#188

Post by hatsunearu »

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…

>What gets me is that lens distortion is a fully reversible convolution.

This is what I thought (it's not really convolution, but yes it is correctable), until I realized darktable/lensfun doesn't have lens profiles for any of my lenses... :(

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

#189

Post by hatsunearu »

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…

If you have depth information blurring can be undone theoretically, but you don't.

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

#190

Post by hatsunearu »

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…

>Basically: why hasn't someone come out with a camera with a junky single-piece lens and a fancy image processing backend and won the market?

that's what phone cameras are...

And a lot of lens aberrations not correctable robustly. LCA is basically impossible to correct, field curvature is impossible to correct, bokeh quality is impossible to correct (within reason), wide depth of field is impossible to correct, dynamic range is impossible to correct (without bracketing), coma is impossible to correct, flaring is impossible to correct and the list goes on.

Post reply on HN