Let’s review this sharpness testing project to date. My objective was a unified field test for sharpness, one that would conflate the effects of camera motion and vibration, lens focus errors, depth-of-field, field flatness, diffraction, and lens defects, and allow degradations from all these effects to be compared with a common yardstick. I succeeded in… [Read More]

I’ve done some more research, and I’m pretty sure that the small variations that I saw in the last post after the obvious vibrations had damped out are the result of a combination of the phosphor dot on the ‘scope not being small enough the lens not being able to focus the dot to a… [Read More]

I came up with a way to explore the camera vibration that is degrading the images in the previous post. I set up an oscilloscope about 30 feet away from the D800E, mounted as before on the StackShot rail and the RRS TVC-34L Versa Series 3 tripod with RRS BH-55 ball head. I turned down… [Read More]

I set out to find out what difference some of the shutter release mechanisms made to the image sharpness, using the same setup as I used for the aperture series in the previous post. I mounted the D800E to the StackShot rail that I will be using to make the exposures, and I mounted that… [Read More]

I did aperture series for both the D4 and D800E with both the Zeiss 100mm f/2 ZF and the Nikon 105mm f/2.8G. Here are the results: The Zeiss’s best aperture on the D4 is f/5.6 and on the D800E is f/8. However, the differences are tiny. The Nikon 105 works best at f/8 on both… [Read More]