50mm ‘lux, Nikkor-H on a7II — center MTF

I tested the on-center resolution of the subject of yesterday’s post, 2007 Leica 50mm f/1.4 Summilux and the 1952 Nikon 50mm f/2 Nikkor-H on the Sony alpha & Mark II (a7II).

Here’s the protocol:

• Camera, lenses, RRS  generic plate
• Landscape orientation
• Arca Swiss C1 head
• RRS TVC-44 legs.
• Imatest SFRPlus target
•  Focused using live view at the taking aperture.
• Paul Buff Einstein strobe set to 5 watt-seconds, for the f/2 shots, 10 ws for the f/2.8 ones, 20 ws for the f/4 ones, following that progression until I got to f/16. The f/16 results were substantially identical, so I threw them away.
• Hot shoe to PC adapter for synching
• EFCS.
• Images developed in Lightroom 5.7.1 with default settings, exported as TIFFs
• measured on-axis MTF50 for horizontal and vertical edges in Imatest

The results, first for the horizontal edges:

The Summilux:

The Nikkor (note that the vertical scale is different:

Both on the same graph:

The results for the vertical edges are not as high, since the a7II’s anti-aliasing filter in more aggressive from side-to-side than up-and-down, but the relationships are about the same:

It’s clear that, in this case, you get what you pay for. It’s also clear that from f/8 on down, there’s little difference between the two lenses performance on the a7II. Even at f/5.6, they’re not that far apart. Wider than that, the Leica shines; actually, it’s a really impressive performance.

When I was using the S2 a lot in the 50s through the 80s, I never thought of the Nikkor-H as a bad lens. It was a bit soft wide open, but that seemed to give a nice look to some pictures. It is clear that the Summilux is in another league.