70-200/2.8 E vs S at 70mm, quantitative

This is the thirteenth in a series of posts about the Nikon 70-200 mm f/2.8 S lens for Nikon Z cameras. The series starts here.

In two previous posts, I did some quantitative comparisons of the Nikon 70-200 mm f/2.8 E and S lenses at 200 mm. Now I’ll do the same at 70 mm.

Particulars:

• 12 meters target distance
• ISO 64
• f/2.8
• Manual exposure, ETTR in live histogram.
• Subject in the center and the upper right corner.
• AF-S pinpoint focusing.
• Six shots at each setting, focusing anew for each shot, picking the best using the Imatest sharpness ranking utility. This method calibrates out focus curvature.
• Developed in Lightroom
• Sharpening set to zero.
• White balance set to gray background on Siemens Star target
• Adobe Color Profile
• Minor exposure adjustments, with same adjustment applied to all images from both lenses, so corner darkening is unaffected.
• Chromatic aberration correction turned off.
• Everything else at default settings

The scene, with  the target centered using the S lens wide open.

A close up of the target region:

I’ll show you a flock of charts, but they all add up to one thing: the two lenses are excellent wide open, and there’s not much to choose between them.

Let’s look at the slanted edge in the center shots:

The S lens is slightly sharper.

In the corner:

The S lens is sharper.

Looking at the Siemens Star computed MTFs at various angles:

Center:

A virtual tie, broken only in the third decimal place of the mean MTF50.

In the corner:

The S lens is sharper. MTF50 mean is .214 cy/px vs .156 cy/px for the E.

A different way of looking at the MTF versus angle follows. These are sometimes called spider graphs. The further the contours are away from the center, the better.

Center:

And finally, Shannon capacity:

The E lens wins. I’m still trying to figure out the utility of this test.

In the corner:

Pretty much a tie.