I guess I was wrong. I was unable to find the correlation between "number of blades" and "evenness of illumination." Only these comments, which suggest that the Sonnar lens with more blades may be worse:
>From http://www.photo.net/contax/t3 The recomputed Sonnar lens of the T3 has virtually no light fall-off, an improvement over the T2 (which isn't as bad as some people say). However, this lens has only 5 iris blades and out-of-focus highlights are pentagonal, apparent especially in night scenes. The T2 has a near-circular aperture with 7 blades. -- Andrew Hall, August 15, 2002 I read all over that the lens does not suffer from light fall off at all apeture. However my experience is otherwise. I also see light fall off in many pictures taken by other T3. See all the above pictures and you can see that vignetting is very apparent. Check the following sites as well: http://myalbum.ne.jp/cgi-bin/a_menu?id=ac473797 http://www.dpgallery.com/resource/t3/t3gallery-andrea.asp -- Wee Keng Hor, November 11, 2002 ------------- >From http://www.photo.net/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=002TQ8 : 3) Can anyone compare shrpness for the T3 with the Contax T. I always found the T sharper than the T2. Since the lenses were supposed to be the same, I assumed it was due to the difference in roundness of the aperature ring. Aperature priority on the T2 is a phony (only good up to 1/125 of a second shutter speed) and I usually used program. In this mode the T2 ignores the aperature ring and uses the shutter blades to form the aperatue, just as in all of the cheapy P&S's. Thus not a very round aperature. -- Jay Goldman , July 31, 2001; 05:00 P.M. Eastern ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
