'Test' image raw files with my Leica 16-35mm Lens. If you'd like you can download the raw files at the link below to check them out. I took shots at 16mm and 18mm at f5.6 and f7.1 on a tripod. I used a bubble level to try and get the camera level and plumb with respect to the wall. Let me know what your thoughts are!
Robert, thanks for providing the raw files, even though I have no SL it's always interesting to see what other systems can do. Web presentations are downscaled and processed too much to make a complete valid comparison (imho of course).
I have mainly looked at the files in LR 6.14 and also loaded them in C1 10.2, but in the latter I can just look and not adjust anything because I have the cheap "Sony only" version.
Here's a few remarks on the raw images, no scientific comparison, just some things I noticed when looking at them:
In lightroom:
- I don't think you were exactly parallel to the building, the right side looks marginally closer, it needs about a -10 horizontal transform in Lightroom to make the shop window exactly rectangular (vs. trapezoid "as shot")
- Center and a large part of the frame looks very good re. sharpness and contrast, seems that the lens is indeed very good and living up to it's Leica name
- however in the 18 mm shots the extreme top right corner starts looking a bit mushy, don't see that at the left top corner. Don't think it's dof, because the gravel in front of the building is still sharp a lot closer to the camera. The 16 mm shot has it less (but still a bit) and the extreme top left corners at both apertures and focal length looks a lot better. Since the two bottom corners are a lot closer to the camera no meaningful observations can be made there.
In C1 and selecting the crop tool I can see a lot more picture around the crop outline which is invisible in lightroom, even putting scale to 95% I get a white border around and don't see anything that can be seen outside the crop lines in C1. It's probably the profile information telling lightroom to ignore/not show that area but there is actually a lot more area covered. Maybe it's my "el-cheapo" Sony version which ignores the Leica profile info and shows stuff that's not supposed to be shown. Here's a screenshot of how that looks for me:
Note the extra windowframe on the right and more detail of the windowframe bottoms of the next floor up.
The embedded jpg's also don't show this extra area.
Those are my observations, I'm sure more things can be found, but short of comparing two different lenses or systems side-by-side with the exact same subject/light I'm not sure how relevant these would be for this purpose.
Last but not least, I really like how you have processed the files you showed in the thread, they look very punchy and sharp without being crunchy and oversharpened (all to my taste of course). If you would be willing to share your post-processing strategy to achieve that I know there will be a big learning opportunity for me (and maybe others as well).