Originally posted by Fenwoodian Roger is my hero! I value his opinion more than anyone else who publishes on the Internet.
Here's my favorite Roger article -
Lens Rentals | Blog .
Thanks, yet another good one from him … there are so many. Loved his series on copy variation.
And with his testing, he takes the camera, postprocessing and the skill of the photographer right out of the question, it's an optical bench, and ten samples.
Originally posted by Fenwoodian Will stopping down the new Pentax 50mm f/1.4 lens to f/2 greatly improve it's sharpness, or will it already have a high level of sharpness wide open? That's the big question I have.
D1N0 has reproduced the MTF curve, but it's a traditional one. You can see both the contrast and the microcontrast wide open, and along the sagittal and meridional axes.
I like the way Canon often does these curves though … they bother plotting the performance at f8 as well, so you do get an idea like that.
As sharp as any lens might be wide open, they all peak several stops down. The planars have a less dramatic lift, but they're also have a narrower aperture as a starting point anyway (like macro lenses).