For HC lenses, there is
hasselbladdigitalforum.com, but it does not offer comparisons with other brands.
Quite on the contrary, many dealers have a full or almost full collection of lenses for rental.
You are correct Jerome.
The bigger issue is not whether we have them on the shelf, but dedicating the time to do a proper test. It's easy to do a test. But quite difficult and time consuming to
do a proper test with equivalent conditions for all the participating products that is of a quality that qualifies for publishing.
And it isn't that we (or any responsible, service-oriented dealer) would wish to hide a lens that doesn't perform well - as was mentioned in one post. We certainly know which lenses don't perform well, even if we don't have an appropriate publish-ready test available. I've performed many, many lens tests that just weren't quite up to the level of a publishable test for various reasons, but gave me enough information to be able to know which lenses perform better or worse than others, and in which situations.
We specifically test internally to know which lenses to recommend or not. If a lens isn't a good performer, there's no.....
darn way in the world we're going to hide that information from our clients.
Do you think _____ (fill in the blank for any number of online merchants) cares if someone buys a crappy lens from them?
I have many lens comparison files that I personally send to my clients who are considering various lenses. And further, we perform custom tests for individual clients - I will ask what type of scene/subject matter, and then will shoot the lenses in question and share the files with that client.
So - unfortunately, a comprehensive, all things equivalent lens comparison across numerous product lines up and down doesn't exist. But it is definitely possible to find out what you need to know. There's many resources out there, forums, end users, manufacturer data, and yes, (some) dealers.
Steve Hendrix
Capture Integration