If you have to ask, you probably couldn't tell anyway. They are all very good, and quite seriousy a good one of one series is better than a average one of another series. The older ones tend to have better build quality, the newer ones tend to have better optical quality. That is simply a trade off between hand assembly in the old lenses, and computer aided design in the newer lenses. I believe though that you could only tell the difference in the images of any of them on a side by side slow-slide-film comparison, and then if you tested two different lenses you may well get a different answer.
The trouble with lens tests is you only get an answer for the lens under test. There is never a big enough sample to make a general evaluation. Now if you were to sample a 1000 samples of the same lens design selected at random, you could probably say something general. It would probably be that the optical quality varied between quite a wide range. Ciao, Graywolf http://pages.prodigy.net/graywolfphoto
