Originally posted by Blue I personally think the improvement we have seen in the last 8 to 10 years hasn't been as much with the actual glass part of the designs as much as it has been with sensor improvement (including firmware/software).
I'm not sure what you mean here, but thanks for the link. Interesting.
The link you sent does suggest that colour of a coating would affect the colour of an image. "Colour-Correcting" that you see mentioned near the end refers to the correction of CA.
The differences between FA and DA colour are pretty easily seen on the same camera, regardless of age (including film, actually). Different coatings for the FA and DA series make sense, since baysian sensors and film see the world differently. I'm also not sure that just because the designer for a lens is the same, that all of his lenses would have the same coating. Especially if the designer believed that there are appropriate lens coatings for digital and film.
The funny thing is this: The FA lenses look way better on film, where post-processing is not really in my reach. They tend to look best out of the box. The DAs do not, they look almost over-processed. However, in RAW format, these lenses retain lots of detail which allows for some nice post-processing, to get whatever look you might desire.
In other words - FA ltds look the best to me for out of the box, and DA ltds look the best when you process them. I prefer the DA rendering personally BECAUSE I love post-processing. If I was shooting JPEGs or wanted to keep my post-processing to a minimum, the FA ltds would win for sure.