Yesteryear, when f/1.4 and f/2 were prime aperture considerations, many pros, before buying a single lens, would borrow as many as 25 samples from their favorite store or importer. They would then painstakingly test one against the other until they had what they thought was the cream-puff lens of the lot. Their major concern was often full-aperture performance of such lenses as the 50mm f/1.4, 85mm f/1.8, 100mm or 105mm f/2, f/2.5, or f/2.8, 180mm f/2.8, and 300mm f/4. Test procedures varied from the do-it-yourself shooting of newspaper pages and optical-bench evaluations to employing near-charlatans who claimed omniscient powers for their own weird optical-testing devices and methods.
I have had a friend mention that lenses are not clear (or are less clear) when I full aperture. That sounded silly to me, because I am often shooting at the widest aperture available (I have a 50mm f/1.4 and 85mm f/1.8) and have not noticed a problem...except when human error messed up the focus! Is there really something to all this?
Posted by: Cooper Strange | July 26, 2007 at 12:35 AM