[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I remember reading in a book (I believe it was one of those Ansel > Adams books..) that the best way to test for Lens sharpness/resolution > was to take a photo of a newspaper stuck to a brick wall at a > reasonable distance and then check the neg/print afterwards to > determine how well the lens holds up.
I can't be bothered with brick walls and newspapers and USAF resolution charts (I have a .pdf of that somewhere). My favourite lens-test target is a local high school building. One of those really old red brick ones with carved stone and ivy and a clock tower sticking out the top. WIth it I can easily check low and high-contrast resolution, distortion, colour fringing and contrast. Plus it makes for some interesting pictures. The building is located right beside their sports field so I can get way back for testing those long lenses, and it faces North so it gets the sun all day (the sun in the South _really_ disoriented me in England). If I want to find out how good a lens is relative to another one, I'll just bring them both along. I did this today with my recently acquired FA*400/5.6 and the 1/10th-the-price Tokina SL 400mm f/5.6. I sure hope that FA lens was worth the money! Cheers, - Dave http://www.digistar.com/~dmann/ (out of date) - This message is from the Pentax-Discuss Mail List. To unsubscribe, go to http://www.pdml.net and follow the directions. Don't forget to visit the Pentax Users' Gallery at http://pug.komkon.org .
