Originally posted by maxfield_photo
Numbers are just numbers. For my money there are three types of lenses: Very sharp, sharp enough, and not sharp enough.
“There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept.” -Ansel Adams
"Sharp is a bourgeois concept" is right up there too...
It is interesting to use the numbers to predict what lenses you might like. Having pretty much completed my aquisition of lenses, I'm guessing it's about to become a lot less important.
But I have to say... when we went from the Sigma 70-300 to the Tamron 90, there was an incredible difference in micro contrast, colour, colour contrast and apparent depth to the images. The images looked 3D from the Tamron, and flat by comparison form the 70-300. There is a lot more than just being sharp, but there's no guarantee that if a lens isn't sharp it has them, and certainly no guarantee that if it is sharp, it doesn't have them.