"The flattening of modern lenses or the death of 3D pop"

[Jan Anne]

Something to muse: if a lens is too "perfect" does it lack character?

To me it does, "boring" is another term I would use

[Jan Anne]

Isn't rendering just another was of saying character?

We're getting into a very vague and highly subjective territory here but for me rendering is about how an image is drawn on the digital canvas as in how the lens handles things which are in focus, the transition from sharp to OOF, the quality of the boke, brightness of the colours, colour cast, (micro) contrast, etc.

Besides rendering charisterics the entire character of a lens is imho also defined by the presence (or lack) of things like mechanical vignetting, handling of starbursts and flare, coma, internal reflections, aberrations that might change the rendering under certain circumstances, performance up close vs longer focus ranges, sharpness curve, etc.

So understanding the character of a lens is necessary to make the lens render the images as envisioned.

But as mentioned this is highly personal, just sharing my thoughts on the matter 

[Hugh_3170]

I like your summary Jan Anne.

We're getting into a very vague and highly subjective territory here but for me rendering is about how an image is drawn on the digital canvas as in how the lens handles things which are in focus, the transition from sharp to OOF, the quality of the boke, brightness of the colours, colour cast, (micro) contrast, etc.

Besides rendering charisterics the entire character of a lens is imho also defined by the presence (or lack) of things like mechanical vignetting, handling of starbursts and flare, coma, internal reflections, aberrations that might change the rendering under certain circumstances, performance up close vs longer focus ranges, sharpness curve, etc.

So understanding the character of a lens is necessary to make the lens render the images as envisioned.

But as mentioned this is highly personal, just sharing my thoughts on the matter 

[chambeshi]

I read again the interviews with experienced designers of leading Nikkor lenses with the photographer Ichigo Sugawara. Namely Hauri Sato [notably 35 f1.4G, 58 f1.4G]and Koichi Oshita [notably 85 f1.4D]. Sato states explicitly their design aim with selected lenses is to balance correction of aberrations (that strives for focus sharpness) against the defocus zones of the scene (bokeh). Thus these primes are designed to produce a gradation of progressively blurred circles of confusion at the margins of the plane of focus. He emphasizes these designs went beyond just MTF performance and sought to render the 3-dimensional aspects of the scene.

This interview is in the well known book - Eyes of Nikon

Over the past 2+ years, I have invested in top glass, including 135 f2 DC, 85 f1.4D and the Zeiss 135 f2APO with ultra-wides (15 f2.8, 21 f2.8, 25 f2). The differences in the respective IQ of these lenses are there to see in the resulting images. The Zeiss wides exhibit more saturated colour rendition compared against both the 24 PCE and older Nikkor primes (20 f4, 20 f3.5). This distinction is widely recognised, eg how the 15 Distagon renders the pale blues of the sky at sunset. Yet the latter two classic Nikkor Twenties still have their distinct niches on modern DSLRs. [And there's no lack of examples of many of these primes posted and discussed in this Forum]

Besides the obvious mechanisms (eg Defocus Control, lens elements to reduce CA in the case of TLs) i'm not that well read to articulate why they differ - couched in the language of optical physics, but this stable of Nikkors and Nikon-fits is each superlative. I would venture to state each lens has its "character". And there are the medium range zooms that perform in their versatile roles when called upon. And I am more than content with this investment and see few unfilled niches to spend yet more to populate :-)

kind regards

woody

[the solitaire]

I did not watch the video, or follow th elink provided in the first post, because I do not wish to feed these monkeys that sprout their emotions or opinions on the internet trying to make them sound scientifical. Thanks to all your replies, I gathered what the contents of his message were about, and I have a very clear opinion on that.

To put some substance to this opinion, I would liek to state that I have used quite a few lenses in the past 25 years. Most of those within the last 5 years though, where I have really grown in my own photography.

I bought and sold many lense sin these years. And only after a while, I found out that I was looking for something that was there all along. 25 years ago a photographer told me that even if focus is not spot-on, an image cn be good, because the message of a photographic image is hardly ever related to MTF charts and graphs. It is related to how individual humans percieve what you isolated/framed from the fabric of everyday reality.

And the tools used to do this can be modern tools or old tools. They can contain 3 glass elements, just one or 15 or more. What it comes down to, is that you tell your story using tools you are confident with. My girlfriend tells her stories with state of the art AF lenses, while I do so with lenses manufactured in the 1970's and 1980's. Now the thing is, we can tell our stories even when I pick up her camera, or she picks up mine.

The death of 3D poop is a guy yelling for attention, and that is all there is to it in my opinion

[benveniste]

Basically the author states that a lens giving 3D pop should not have more than 9 lens elements

Statements guys?

When this discussion starts, I find it's time to break out the popcorn and watch the fireworks: