The butterfly's wing is perfectly sharp at the upper right and lower left corners, with some small loss of the resolution, as usual. The rest is simply out of DOF, but, a very small detail is sharp, in the extreme lower right corner, inside tolerance of DOF. It looks like a very good lens, for me, at least. LZ
I think you're right, I've been quite conservative with the number of steps, my D810 is reaching 200k actuations. Maybe I should just nuke it and buy a D850/Z7, who knows?
That comatic aberration is especially weird, it's probably Oof mush that the program is trying to make sense of, thereby taking specular reflections as actual detail.
Here's one where the edges are sharp-ish as well. I somehow overlooked newby mistakes. I'll make another stack just for the sake of it.
Not saying the lens is bad, it's $1700 for what essentially is the size of a film canister. The corners just aren't "good".
You can see an example here:
https://www.photomacrography.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=41112 These are from totally manual setups with a resolution of 0.5 microns, so there's no way I missed the best depth of focus.
Thanks for the examples and elaborations. I can follow all that. If you have a lens which produces mush in the corners there is no benefit in increasing resolution. What I struggle to understand is this notion (implied or not) of somehow being worse off with a higher res sensor. Maybe there is an unstated assumption about storage space and processing. And of course if people upgrade their camera to a higher res model they can be disappointed if they were hoping to be able to do certain things. But if higher-res sensors can be made at the same price point and as long as storage capacities continue to more or less evolve according to Moore's law, there is nothing much to worry about, even if there were no new lenses from now on.
Nice images of the butterfly wing and chip BTW!
If we control for everything, then there isn't a real benefit. If not, obviously better ergonomics etc is the benefit.
If I have a lens that can only resolve a 4x4 unit pixel, then splitting this 4x4 into 4 segments of 2x2 pixels doesn't do anything. It's digital enlargement and on a pixel level, it's going to look less sharp.
High MP cameras (D850) will always cost more than their low MP (D780) counterparts with chronology being accounted for. So the question is, would that extra $1000+ that one is expected to pay worthwhile? When resolution is bottle-necked by the lens, no. For future proofing and potential newly released lenses to at least match the resolution? Perhaps, depends on how one values money, because next several years there's going to be a new toy that will make the current one cheaper.
You're not worse off, it's just pointless as the improvement will be marginal at best. What the author of the article fails to acknowledge likely due to the mirrorless bandwagon is "new F-mount lenses can always be made". Hell, we have several dozen existing ones that pair absolutely fine already! So >36MP is not pointless and certainly not "worse off", that's unless we're talking about the circle I'm in. A Mit 10x Apo is $900 new (works well with the D850), the HR version with an NA of 0.42 is $8000+, it couples well with a sensor that has 3x3um pixels (Sony a7R4 has a pitch of about 3.7um).
However at 20x, all this is turned upside down. The 20x with an NA of 0.42 resolves about 6.1x6.1um pixels, the D810 works pretty well with 4.87x4.87um, how about higher? Not so much. One isn't worse off, there's just close to zero improvements image-wise. If we go to Mit's 50x NA0.55, then it's 9x9um, the "just don't zoom in" category. It can be said that one is better off cropping into the 20x 0.42 and keeping that at least $800 for a used copy that might not work at all. Unless there's a commercial and scientific need for big fat objectives with adequate WA and high NA, all at actually acceptable prices, the D810 is pretty much topped out when it comes to image quality.
All this changes with the introduction of pixel shift though, which is capable to circumvent this resolution matching fiasco and pop out beautiful detail, even on lenses that can't resolve its pixels. So at the end of the day, higher MP is still justified regardless of the author's rationalism or cherrypicked charts. Oh, downsampling is always an option too, I downsample my 36MP shots into 18MP ones. Goodbye mushy corners.
