the last word

A reader — thanks, Chris! — made a comment yesterday that I think raises some points worthy of attention. So what needs to change in the camera, presuming the sharpness is in the OTUS , to get it out? Physics says f4 and that’s not changing soon, unless we hear from the Large Hadron Collider…. [Read More]

In several days of trying, I can’t focus the Nikon D810 accurately enough for the focus error standard deviations to be less than the repeated exposure standard deviations. The first thing I tried was to change the target from a Siemens star to a combination of the star and a zone plate: You can’t see… [Read More]

I’ve been reporting on the results of testing sharpness, as measured by MTF50 results from slanted-edge testing with the Otus 55/1.4 on the Nikon D810 and the Sony alpha 7R (a7R). For the last few days, I’ve posted nothing. That hasn’t been because I’ve stopped working. It’s been because I haven’t been able to produce… [Read More]

We saw in the preceding post that, once we deep-sixed Lightroom’s capricious sharpening, the a7R and the D810 offered similar resolution (as measured by MTF50) in one direction and that the D810 did somewhat better in the other, when the target was illuminated with electronic flash, and we used trailing curtain synch on the a7R… [Read More]

I scratched my head about yesterday’s results, which seemed to show that the Otus 55/1.4 ZF.2 had greater resolution on the Sony alpha 7R (a7R) than on the Nikon 810. from the comments, some of you were just as confused as I.  One of you nailed the problem, which was developing the images in Lightroom… [Read More]