RE: [Leica] digital glass

["Phong" <phong@doan-ltd.com>]

Tom,

Thank you for a most interesting report, though being
a Leica and Canon shooter, the specifics of the new Nikon
lens are of little more than an academic interest to me.
Your conclusion regarding negative film, transparency,
and digital parallel my own exactly.

Cheers,

- - Phong

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> [mailto:owner-leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us]On Behalf Of tlianza
> Sent: Tuesday, July 15, 2003 11:22 PM
> To: leica-users@mejac.palo-alto.ca.us
> Subject: [Leica] digital glass
>
>
> Hi to all,
>
> I recently purchased the new Nikon 12-24mm lens that was designed
> specifically their digital cameras.  It was a very enlightening
> experience,
> because it demonstrated how a "blank page" design could really
> lead to some
> excellent quality and it illustrates an endearing comittment to a
> lens mount
> that has served them well over thirty years.... The lens offered very low
> distortion for a wide angle zoom, the off axis performance is
> excellent with
> minimal color.  As someone who has designed lenses in the past,
> this lens is
> a technical tour de-force.  Naturally, it's profoundly retro
> focus, the exit
> pupil is located quite a distance from the principle points so control of
> coma must have been a real problem for the designers.  They seem to have
> done a fine job there.  Off axis specular reflections are quite
> symmetrical
> and vignetting is quite minimal for a lens of that focal length.  The
> designer could take into account the glass in front of the sensor and that
> is a real necessity for control of chromatic aberration. The lens utilizes
> the newer AFS motor which allows you to simply overide the auto focus, by
> manually focusing or you can simply switch it off at the lens.
> The combined
> weight of a D100 camera and this lens is less than 3/4 the weight of my M7
> with the 35 summilux.  A single battery is good for about 500 shots which
> nicely fills a DVD for archiving on the go.  So, why do I keep
> the M series
> and R series cameras?  They take great pictures (technically) and they are
> very tough.  I've been working on workflow techniques to make the digital
> tone reproduction mimic the film->digital workflow but there are real
> challenges there.
>
>  I ran an interesting series of tests that utilized 5 camera/film
> combinations (3 leica bodies (2M, 1 R) 2 Nikon bodies, 5
> different types of
> film) compared to the digital output from the D100.  I then took six
> different scenes.  The film images were scanned in an LS4000 scanner and
> then all the digital files where printed at 12X18 inches using a fuji
> frontier printer.  I then asked observers to rank-weight the images.  In 5
> of the six tests, the digital camera (6 Mega pixel) was judged
> "better".  In
> one instance, the observers generally chose an image shot with an
> R6/Summilux 80 combination on a fine grain transparency film.  One of the
> first observations was that whatever image quality advantage the
> leicas had
> on the film, was lost in the scanning-printing process. It appeared that
> grain noise was more objectional to the observers than resolution
> issues and
> the sharpening utilized in the digital camera images had very
> little impact
> on the apparent noise in the image.  Inspite of the low resolution of the
> digital camera, the fact that it required only one optical step
> allowed for
> less sharpening and lower noise recording than the film
> combinations. I also
> suspect that the fuji frontier imaging system also contributed to
> the image
> degredation.  So what I am seeing in my work and my tests is that
> the output
> path (scanning-> paper) is a greater limiting factor than digital
> resolution
> vs analog film resolution.  Examination of the film images under
> a loop and
> higher magnifications showed that the Leica images may have a bit of an
> edge, but there was no obvious difference.  That accounted for the obvious
> confusion in the evaluations of the reproductions after the digital image
> was removed from the test: no single camera/film combination
> stuck out as a
> winner.  At this point in time, I feel pretty comfortable with either
> digital or analog workflows.  If I'm in a situation that requires a wide
> dynamic range capture, I use negative film.  If I'm shooting for
> saturation
> and sharpness, I'll use transparency film .  If I need a decent image with
> almost no hassles or in a short time period, I'll shoot with digital and I
> know that at modest reproduction sizes, it will do just fine. Now
> I can stop
> screwing around with all this testing and just go out and shoot....
>
>
> Tom Lianza
> Technical Director
> Sequel Imaging Inc.- A GretagMacbeth Company
> 25 Nashua Rd.
> Londonderry, NH 03053
>
>
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