jonoslack
Active member
Sorry, this is absolutely not the case - in fact, the lens with the steepest angle of incidence in the Leica range is the 28mm elmarit asph, which was designed to go with the M8.I know the theory behind what you are talking about. And I believe some of the corner problems in the M cameras (and lenses) are due to the fact that they were designed decades back for film and were not digital specific designs. Once the digital age hit, they are now trying to make the old film designs perform really well under digital, which is what led to the M8 requiring to be a 1.3x sensor, even with micro-lens offsetting and the M9 requiring even more radical micro-lens offsetting design to make it work, with a 1.0x sensor.
The above however, is diametrically different from cameras like the NEX, which have been built from the ground up, with digital in mind. And as long as the RF lenses were designed over the past 5 years or so (after the onset of the digital age), my feeling is that it will not have any issues.
Telecentric lens design adds complications which have ramifications in terms of size and design - Leica and Zeiss and especially Voigtlander are not designing their modern lenses with consideration for modern sensors which don't correct for them.
There wouldn't have been, as it really isn't an issue with film!Of course the older lenses may or may not have issues and its performance is, in turn dependent on how they were originally designed and whether there was a big focus on lens telecentricity during their original design phase.
Exactly, so the lens would have been both telecentric, and, more to the point, it wold have had an exit pupil around the size of the tiny 2/3 sensor in the R1.And everytime Douglas brings up the "incident angle" issue, I point him to the Sony DSC-R1, which came with a 1.68x near-APS-C sized sensor and its 14.3-71.5mm f/2.8-4.8 lens, had its rear element positioned just 2.1mm (that is millimeters !) from the digital sensor plane. Absolutely no micro-lens offsetting, absolutely no vignetting, absolutely no aberrations or optical imperfections that one could detect - corner to corner. The imaging was as close to perfect, from an optical standpoint. Of course the difference here is that the Sony R1 was built from the ground up to be a digital product (and so was its lens)......as is the NEX camera.
You should treat all rangefinder lenses like this - they mostly have a small exit which means that there must be a steep angle of incidence at the edge of a sensor.The lenses we are talking about, are Full-frame rangefinder lenses after all, and not lenses that barely cover the APS-C imaging circle. But I agree, that with the older designs, I might treat it on a case-by-case basis on how well they perform on digital.
these modern lenses are costly (often many times the cost of the NEX) - I think it's pretty rash to assume that they are going to work well on a sensor which wasn't even a consideration during the design procedure. I don't say they WON'T work, just that one shouldn't make assumptions.