Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 1998/12/28
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]At 02:05 PM 12/28/98 -0500, you wrote: >Don’t care much that the Reckmeyer article is sixty years old, nor what anyone >in particular may think of, or about, Mr. Romney- it is, simply, the NBS chart >and instructions for its use that is of primary concern here. Something that old is going to miss the imaging standards that exist at camera manufacturers now. This is just a glorified wall chart, I'm guessing. Anything anybody is going to do at home is going to be questionable in theory as well as practice. >Everybody gets better, gray area fades and contrast gets brighter. Nope. What would happen is that some people would continue the incorrect notion that sharpness is the most important, or the single factor, that determines lens quality. It isn't and it doesn't. So what purpose would it serve? I'm much more likely to trust my sifting through all the reactions people have on this list to their own lenses (not single samples, but a group sample) and extrapolate from that. For example. Who here has ever said the 19mm 2.8 Elmarit R (current second generation) is a dog of a lens? Nobody. Everyone who has used it are singularly uniform in it's praise. And this reaction is born out totally by formal tests by people who have much more elaborate equipment than the above test requires. So we have those tests, and universal praise amongst users. No sharpness test is going to change my opinion of this lens. Besides, I already own it. What good is testing it now with some chart? I see what it does on film, and that's more important than any test that tests one performance characteristic. Need I drone on? Nope. - -- Eric Welch St. Joseph, MO http://www.ponyexpress.net/~ewelch 98% of all statistics are useless.