Originally posted by Dewman For a lens to be "top drawer," it's got to be more than just sharp. But, it if has all the other desired attributes and is only a 6 on the sharpness scale, then what?
The thing is, after decades of being brainwashed by photography magazines and manufacturers who pay for them via ads, people have come to value a very narrow understanding of sharpness, aka resolution, as if it was indeed everything. Manufacturers rejoice, because it helps them to sell zillions-of-megapixels cameras and ridiculously priced lenses with an ever-growing element count and the fanciest specialty glasses used to achieve that oh-so-coveted "corner-to-corner sharpness". Over their pixel-peeping raptures, customers are ignoring other attributes of image quality that are no less important to overall image quality, notably (micro)contrast, colour saturation and rendition, correction of chromatic and other aberrations, flare resistance, vignetting, and image distortion. To my mind, it is the careful balancing of all these traits that makes a lens optically great, and it is in this respect that designing lenses still remains an art.
Paradoxically, then, we are now in a situation where essentially unbalanced lenses - technically "corner-to-corner-sharp" lenses - are unquestioningly awarded the highest accolades even when they render rather dull colours and lack in microcontrast. And as if that wasn't enough, marketing has no scruples about dubbing such lenses, wait for it, "Art Series" lenses, while nearly perfectly balanced lenses are merely perceived as, well, underwhelmingly "soft" lenses. It's kind of painful to watch, really. [End of rant.]