Originally posted by niels hansen It is always a pleasure to read Steves comments, has he ever time for sleeping? New lenses are not bad, but are they value for money? Only if money is not a problem- I Am a member of the Danish Photo Historical Society. One of the members has made many tests with legacy lenses on his Sony alfa. His conclusion is very clear. Many well regarded manual lenses perform badly on digital.Especially the wide angles. My own best example is a Soligor 20 mm , decent on film, but a disaster on k30 and kp.
It seems that we have to test the individual camera/lens combination, my favourite is m42 super Takumar 135 mm 2,4 and 1o5 mm 2.8 smc
Do note that the Sony A7 series of cameras have a very thick filter stack and it does affect the quality on the edges even more.
I have compared my A7 with Kolari thin filter mod to my brother's un-modded A7 and there was a difference.
The interesting thing is that I find that my old K mount wides perform better on the K1 resized down to 24mp vs my modded A7.
That said, if only based on a technical standpoint on sharpness on the edges, modern wides do generally perform better.
Nothing is free though imo.
The modern wides (and in fact most of the modern tack sharp lenses) are also often larger and heavier.
In many real world uses, the edges don't contain visual elements (sky, grass, distant horizons) that need to be as sharp or that the edges have horizons which are not that clear anyway due to atmospheric haze.
The oddity to smaller lenses are the ultra wides in 14-15mm focal length.
The Laowa 14/2.8 for example is sharper all thru and smaller than the venerable A15/3.5
Quite the same can be said about the Irix 15 and Samyang 14/2.8 too.