[bdery]

Well, stopping down affects the way the light travels and therefor a variable also affected differently with different sensors.

That is true - in theory. However stopping down will affect the lens many orders of magnitude more than it will affect the sensor.

[jeffshaddix]

Correct, This is why I use an optics testing bench to test my lenses - it removes the camera/sensor from the equation and it gives me solid, repeatable data on how a lens performs.

Have you ever posted those results? I'm sure many of us would be interested, especially since you have such a large collection.

[ak_kiwi]

Here goes...

There a re a few elements that will affect this.

First, the AA filter indeed. Second, the way the sensor is designed. In particular, the size of the light gathering surface (it's a CMOS so a lot of the sensor space is actually electronics, not light sensing) will have an influence. To better gather light, CMOS sensors usually have microlenses to direct most of the light on the sensing surface, away from the electronics.

all of this can (and will) influence the angle of acceptance, which means that light coming at certain angles might not be detected, or not as well, or not in the same way.

Thanks for that bdery - I hadn't thought of the additional micro lenses on the cmos sensor.
Yes the sensors of the K-5 and K10D are like chalk and cheese in comparison. I have a K10D because I like the difference it brings to certain types of shots , like portraits for instance.

Lastly, what increases or decreases the sharpness of a lens (all other things being equal) are the aberrations, and because of what I stated earlier, a given sensor might be more sensitive to one type of aberrations, and less to another.

Another good point - I initially thought my K-3 was noisier than my K-5 series cameras but some of what I was seeing was what you describe.

Thanks again
Chris

[Digitalis]

Have you ever posted those results? I'm sure many of us would be interested, especially since you have such a large collection.

Several years ago I did that once on Leica forums when I compared Leica, Voigtlander, Carl Zeiss and Konica Hexanon lenses. The results caused some controversy and some of those leicaphiles still haven't put their torches and pitchforks down.

.....I get enough hate mail as things are.

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Last edited by Digitalis; 09-04-2014 at 02:13 AM.