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[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
I've been thinking in the wake of some recent discussions of optical quality that every camera user community I've been exposed to (Pentax, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, Leica, Minolta) seems convinced that their lenses are at least as good if not better than the other brands. This includes people on this list and friends of mine who have switched from Nikon or Canon to Canon or Nikon, or to Pentax, guys like me who have moved from Pentax to Nikon (not for the glass), etc.
The only real exception to this is the first string of the third party
manufacturers--Sigma, Tamron, Tokina. People seem to debate which of them is better but only recently compare them to the manufacturer's lenses.
There seem to be several possible explainations for this.
1) Somebody is wrong. Perhaps Leica IS better but those of us without the
money will never know. Perhaps Minolta is NOT as good but the user community hasn't discovered it or can't admit it.
2) Everybody is right, and there is very little difference in quality between comparable lenses from all the manufacturers. It took me a while
to realize that advertisements did not focus on the qualitative differences between products because in general there were no significant
qualitative differences between products. Realistically, most modern lenses are "good enough" for the needs of the users in any given price class. Increasingly, manufacturers are tailoring optical quality more precisely to price class as they learn not only to
engineer quality in but also to engineer it out. The days of a cheap lens
potentially being a great lens are passing. This may account for the increase in popularity of the older equipment made in an era when this
did not happen (and equipment was not cheap...)
3) There is enough variation in all the manufacturer's lens lines that
everyone has some duds and some killers and user opinion depends a lot
on what subset of the lens line he has experienced. Certainly there is
a lot of difference across price lines within each brand, more so in some than others. I'm increasingly convinced that the reason most pros say
Canon is better and most advanced amateurs on this list seem to be disgusted with Canon is that Canon has the greatest range of variation across its product line, whereas Pentax may have the least.
4) The various brands are optimized differently, with Nikon aiming for greater corner sharpness at the expense of bokeh and coma, Canon aiming
for optical specs at the expense of distortion, Pentax aiming for center sharpness and bokeh at the expense of corner performance, etc. Thus, a given brand may be better at giving a certain "look", or under certain conditions of use. It may also be a question of what fault annoys a user more--distortion, coma, bad bokeh, lack of corner sharpness, bad color balance, etc. Eventually each user migrates toward the brand which
offers the best combination of optimizations for his taste.
DJE
-- graywolf http://graywolfphoto.com/graywolf.html
