the last word

I went back and did the testing of the previous post using the self-timer (set to 2 seconds) to release the shutter. The results are cleaner because there’s no hand-induced vibration, but say the same thing: leaving live view on with the M240 won’t hurt your sharpness with the tripod and ball I used and… [Read More]

There has been discussion on the web (here) of unsharp Leica M240 images made with live view. Now that I have a tool to measure vibration-induced lack of sharpness, I thought I’d take a look. When you’re in live view mode on the M240 the shutter is open. When you press the shutter release, the… [Read More]

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]