As I understand it, digital sensors place a premium on a lenses ability to correct for color aberrations across the plane of the sensor. Most of these lenses are well corrected APO's - focussing all colors at the same point.
I haven't heard any discussion with regard to sharpness and the newer CMOS chips, but I would assume that the same principles would apply.
From what I've picked up over the last couple of years in several discussion forums, image sharpness in digital capture also relates to the aperture as well, but not in the way that you may expect. There is a 'sweet spot' for the aperture that is equal (or nearly equal to) the size of the sensors wells. The older Philips 6mp chip had wells of 12 microns. The sweet spot for maximum image sharpness is f11 or so. Newer 11mp chips use a 9 micron well size, I'd guess that, based on that info, f8 would be the sharpest aperture to use.
Stopping down for greater depth of field actually decreases overall sharpness. You can test it yourself. We did, and, while the effect is not drastic, it is there. We saw it starting at around f32. The effect is easily corrected with a judicial amount of USM.
Bob Marchant wrote:
However , dedicated digital lenses provide a more than 'noticeable' increase in sharpness over 35 mm lenses and medium format lenses , and a huge increase over large format lenses.
IMHO they are the way to go.
-- Jeff Smith Smith/Walker Design and Photography
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