Since lots of people are testing lenses at present I thought I'd join in - hope you don't mind. Besides its a really crappy day here with lots of snow and high winds, so what else is there to do.
I pinned up a print out of the USAF target to my wall (approx four feet from the camera), mounted my *istDS on a sturdy tripod, mounted a variety of lenses all set to F8 on the camera, fired the camera in RAW mode with 2 second delay (i.e. mirror up). Opened the images in PSCS, cropped out the center section of the target, converted to JPG and loaded them to this page. http://www.ist.uwaterloo.ca/~fwwidall/LensTest/index.html The lenses I chose for this highly scientific and precise testing were 1) DA18-55mm F3.5-5.6 (@50mm) 2) F70-210mm F4.5-5.6 (@70mm from 6 feet) 3) FA28-90mm F3.6-5.6 (@50mm) 4) M 50mm F1.7 5) S-M-C Takumar 35mm F3.5 (with K adapter mounted on Sakar 1.7x converter) 6) SMC Takumar 55mm F2 (with K adapter) For what its worth to my aging eyes the ranking is 6,4,1,5,3,2 Nothing too surprising in that the prime lenses seem to be better, even the one on the Sakar teleconverter. If the weather improves tomorrow I may try repeating the tests but use a more distant target. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Fred Widall, URL: http://www.ist.uwaterloo.ca/~fwwidall ----------------------------------------------------------------------
