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Schneider 60XL on 60mpx chip (Credo60/IQ160 etc) samples

f8orbust

Active member
Such a shame that S/K are leaving. Along with many others I preferred the S/K offerings to the R/S ones. Size, weight, low distortion, rendering, image circle, and cost - there was a lot to like.

I doubt S/K were ‘beat’ - they’re a big company with a lot of resources - rather they will have looked at where they think this sector is going, and simply didn’t like what they saw. That’s worrying for everyone.

So, that just leaves R/S - for now at least. Even the much lauded 32mm didn’t perform terribly well when shifted on the 44x33 CMOS sensor, so who knows how it will perform on the next generation full-frame CMOS sensor coming next year. If performance is worse, will R/S then create a new generation of (wide angle) lenses, or will they take a long, hard look at this sector and come to the same conclusion S/K did ?

Let's hope not.

Jim
 

jagsiva

Active member
Some samples. All shot at ISO35, 0.5s, f11, LCC applied.

15mm/25mm/30mm shifts to the left. All crops are extreme left at Top, Middle, Bottom. I left the lens correction (C1PRO9) sharpness fall off at zero. It does improve the extreme shifts a little. If you have somewhere I can dump the raws, let me know.

Files are not showing as sharp after the upload, but you can see the relative differences here.







 

torger

Active member
Thanks for the examples. One can see a fair bit of saturation loss due to crosstalk; it's worth mentioning that this is a symmetric design and with large shifts on this lens you get the same effects as the old SK wide lenses concerning loss of color fidelity. The Credo 60 will fair better though concerning that aspect due to its larger pixels.

Considering sharpness I think the result is clearly better than what I got. I think I will send in my copy for re-alignment.
 

jagsiva

Active member
Thanks for the examples. One can see a fair bit of saturation loss due to crosstalk; it's worth mentioning that this is a symmetric design and with large shifts on this lens you get the same effects as the old SK wide lenses concerning loss of color fidelity. The Credo 60 will fair better though concerning that aspect due to its larger pixels.

Considering sharpness I think the result is clearly better than what I got. I think I will send in my copy for re-alignment.
Good point on colour sat. Wonder why we don't have "colour saturation falloff" correction in C1:confused:
 

torger

Active member
Schneider is leaving the large format lens business entirely. Rodenstock was destroying them market share wise. Not a surprise as most of the tech cam lenses we have sold in the last four years have been Rodenstock. Whomever hinted at a new line of Schneider retro focus lenses is incorrect. They got beat and are going home.
Not sure the same is true for Europe where there is a market for mid-range systems too, and large format film sales although small is not zero. I've heard that Linhof is not happy having to remake all their mounts for their 6x17 cameras (which is currently exclusively Schneider). Yes, they actually sell some of these cameras. Here's some nice examples what a skilled landscape photographer can do with it: Markus Renner Images ? Fine Art Panoramaphotographie*-*Bildarchiv*-*Island

But regardless sales you can't make much money from large format digital and film lenses, it's more of a prestige and tradition line, I think there must be more values than just profit to make these lenses. I think someone at Schneider just decided that they want to prioritize profit and just give up the tradition. I don't know but I would be surprised if they were actually losing money on the lenses, I think it's a business decision in the line of "cut branches that doesn't generate enough profits". Of course if they had wanted they could easily make the same type of lenses Rodenstock has done, or what I think they should have done, continued to be in the tasteful weight/complexity-vs-performance tradeoff but updated to match the current sensor landscape. It's not that they're lacking the capability to make and develop lenses.

I just hope that Rodenstock doesn't make the same decision, because surely they could. There is not much money in this business, and I think that from a strict business perspective pulling out and invest money elsewhere is not a bad idea. The reason they're still in I think is that someone in the leadership actually cares about large format photography and wants it to exist as a choice for photographers also in the future. Unfortunately Schneider did not have the same.

I assume also the unique fine art xxl lenses will cease production, Rodenstock does not have an alternative to those which have 900mm image circle suitable for ultra large format. Actually most Rodenstock large format film lenses show up as "discontinued" when I do a search, so I don't really know what the status is there.

I would not be surprised if there is no large format lens manufacturer at all in a few years analog or digital, but even after cease production the systems will live for at least 10 more years, just look at Contax. So I see no reason to not buy Schneider today if you like the lenses, just as you can get Copal shutters today although production has already ceased. Copal didn't "get beaten" by anyone by the way, they just considered the whole market to be too small.
 

Paul2660

Well-known member
Good point on colour sat. Wonder why we don't have "colour saturation falloff" correction in C1:confused:
This is a great question, and one that I found when I was testing the IQ150 vs my IQ260.

When you shoot the 50MP CMOS chip, and shift say 10mm to 15mm, the amount of red that is displayed on the LCC is tremendous. If you go back and look at the actual files, you can visually see a lot of color/sat fallout on the shifted edge. When I was testing the first day, I said to myself, (done deal, you just can't shift this back). The amount of red on a 15mm shift, I would say is so much that you can't even see the grey of the LCC.

To my surprise, C1, makes an excellent correction, in fact, it pulls back the vast majority of the color and saturation on these extreme shifts. Enough so that I found I did not need to make much additional changes. This fact was a pleasant surprise for me as when viewing the captured LCC's my feelings were that there was not way that the file would work. On a solid blue sky, C1 pulled back a very nice balance, and gave me most of my greens back. I am sure at 15mm there is plenty of crosstalk, but even at a 100% view I did not see anything that really distracted from the file.

What also surprised me, was how poorly the IQ260 corrected, on the same shots. I have stated this before in many posts on this site, that I always have a lot of trouble with the HR-W40mm on 15mm shift if there is blue (solid) involved. A lot of tweaking is needed even after the LCC is applied. At least for me. Now that I was working with the IQ150 and 260, I also noticed that C1 seemingly pulled more color period out of the shifts of the 50MP files. Something I guess I had not noticed before as I did not have 2 backs to work with.

It would appear outwardly, that Phase One, did improve the LCC processing on the 50MP back, but they have NOT gone back and reworked the LCC algorithms for the CCD backs, at least the 2x backs, 260, 280, and possibly the 180. I have to say, I was very impressed by just how good Phase C1 did on the recovery for the IQ150. The correction was more than enough to make 15mm shifts workable, even with a massive amount of solid blue sky. I wish they would go back and re-work the processing on the CCD backs.

Paul C
 

torger

Active member
Did another test of my SK60XL today, and it's clearly not performing normally. The right shift (example posted earlier in this thread) has a strange curvature in the focal plane, while it works quite fine with left shift. Another alternative is that there would be some damage to my camera that has hurt parallelism but I think the error would have been more symmetric (looking like accidental swing) if so. The lens boards are not symmetric on the Techno so I can't just turn the lens upside down to test (I could dismantely it to test, but I rather leave that to the experts).

I'll contact my dealer (this lens I bought new) and ask what to do.

In any case, my results in this thread can be ignored so far, as something is faulty in my system.
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Such a shame that S/K are leaving. Along with many others I preferred the S/K offerings to the R/S ones. Size, weight, low distortion, rendering, image circle, and cost - there was a lot to like.

I doubt S/K were ‘beat’ - they’re a big company with a lot of resources - rather they will have looked at where they think this sector is going, and simply didn’t like what they saw. That’s worrying for everyone.
They were beat.

New lenses take several years from concept to batch production delivery. They released a 28XL lens in a year when 90% of backs being sold were poor candidates for that lens. It was brilliant on older backs, but they didn't look far enough ahead when they started designing it. The situation was so poor they discontinued the lens shortly after release; there is no chance they recovered their costs on the very low quantity I saw sold.

Rodenstock has been the overwhelming majority of our tech camera sales for several years, and they sell at a higher price point than Schneider's did.

Rodenstock beat Schneider – simple as that. I've spoken to the head of Rodenstocks camera-lens division (they also do industrial lenses and other niches); their tech camera lens sales were already rising year-over-year for several years before this news. With Schneider no longer competing I suspect their sales will be improved even further.

It's not a huge market, but it is more than enough for one manufacturer to thrive.
 

torger

Active member
Beat or not, a problem is that Rodenstocks are bad candidates too as we've seen on CMOS, and Dalsa performance under the surface is not exactly impressive either. Phase One has pushed their algorithms to the limit to cover up microlens ripple and tiling, and I've done the same thing too with my Lumariver algorithms (better than C1 actually). Still crosstalk makes colors suffer. Luckily most photographers have a better eye for pixel peep sharpness than for color, although the latter is arguably more important for image quality (the skilled eye see it from any distance).

Hopefully next CMOS batch is BSI, and hopefully the results are better than the initial reports I've got on the A7r-II BSI sensor, otherwise Rodenstock Digarons are on the track of obsoleteness as well.

The truth is that sensor manufacturers (since Kodak) have never cared about tech cam lenses, and neither Rodenstock or Schneider have been able to predict the performance of future sensors. Schneider obviously hoped for BSI or similar tech to arrive earlier than it did (the SK28XL is a disaster on Dalsas and it's a mystery they released it at all, but ironically you still get more image circle out of it than the 28 Digaron-S as the latter has a hard-limited 70mm IC), and Rodenstock did predict that retrofocus would be necessary but didn't make them retrofocus enough, especially for the CMOS. So now we have color fidelity and ripple problems which some choose to ignore, and some (like myself) consider it to be a substantial performance issue.

Things can make a quick turn in this market. What if the coming full-frame CMOS has worse angular response than the current Sony? That can happen, it just takes a high pixel count. The Rodenstock 32mm will suddenly lose its sexiness. Hopefully Rodenstock then has a plan to produce a new set of lenses with more retrofocus than today. Unfortunately with longer more retrofocus lenses it will become more difficult to exceed regular SLR lenses in performance, unless you make them very bulky. Think an more advanced Canon TS-E 24 II in medium format size. 1500 grams wide angle costing $10-12k anyone?

Tech cam future is by no means "safe", but I think it doesn't really matter to us users. You buy a camera to use now and a few years ahead. If it becomes a dead end in terms of upgradeability you sell off and get a different system, and that was that.
 

torger

Active member
I wish they would go back and re-work the processing on the CCD backs.
I haven't done any recent tests, but I would suspect that the results may be a coincidence. Crosstalk depends on so many factors that it's hard to predict. Sensor orientation of course, but also what light and what colors there are, so it's hard to fix. I prefer to check "in the lab" to see how much color channels are mixed and then accept a maximum level, say 10% or so, and check what the image circle becomes. When testing on scenes only you risk ending up with "as it works well on this scene I consider this shift amount be okay", and then in some other situation with other light and color a problem pops out. Some are okay with that, and that's fine by me, but this sort of "random" performance concerning color fidelity is not how I like a camera to perform.

That's why I'm still on Kodak to run my Schneider lens farm... the IQ150 et al aren't as bad as they could be (on retrofocus Rodenstocks!) due to the smaller size (and offset microlenses help too), you don't need to shift as much (unless you make stitches). I think/hope my next sensor will be a 44x33mm BSI Sony, I don't think it will fix all problems but hopefully it gets above the acceptable level for me, but I will have to swap out my widest Schneiders for Rodies.
 

f8orbust

Active member
They were beat...
Aw Doug, you're all heart. :cry:

I guess from the perspective of a retailer - great - now the consumer has no place to go but a more expensive lens line.

From the perspective of a photographer - it's a great loss, no two ways about it.

Maybe the market is enough for one manufacturer of lenses to make a profit - for now at least - but a market with no competition generally isn't a healthy one.

With Alpa, Cambo and A/S all now producing mounts to allow Canon EF lenses to be used, who knows what the future holds ...

Jim
 

dougpeterson

Workshop Member
Aw Doug, you're all heart. :cry:

I guess from the perspective of a retailer - great - now the consumer has no place to go but a more expensive lens line.

From the perspective of a photographer - it's a great loss, no two ways about it.

Maybe the market is enough for one manufacturer of lenses to make a profit - for now at least - but a market with no competition generally isn't a healthy one.

With Alpa, Cambo and A/S all now producing mounts to allow Canon EF lenses to be used, who knows what the future holds ...

Jim
I think you misinterpret the tenor and purpose of my post.

I personally mourn for Schneider lenses. The first tech camera lenses I ever used were the 24XL and 35XL; they were stunning on the P45+. Before using them I had no idea how stark the difference was between a good lens and a great one. As a "retailer" I'd LOVE to have a less expensive option for clients who want a tech cam but can't justify the cost of lenses like the 32HR or 90HR-SW.

I just have no qualm about why they are leaving the market: they got beat. Put simply: they weren't making enough lenses that end users were buying in any meaningful quantity.

For anyone buying lenses for tech cameras in the last three years our recommendations have been (loosely in order of frequency of purchase):
- 32HR
- 90HR-SW
- 40HR
- 60XL
- 70HR
- 120ASPH
- 23HR
- 28HR

The 120ASPH is a fantastic lens, but was a niche in the tech cam world (given how long it is). Which means we commonly recommended/sold ONE Schneider lens.

As you mention there are now several options for using Canon/Nikon glass on a digital back. I don't personally find this very attractive as the quality of these lenses is not in the same league as the 32HR and similar Rodenstocks. But it does open the possibility for someone to make an uber lens which purposely simultaneously targets medium-format cameras and small-format cameras.

Any meaningfully sized market attracts competition in one form or another, and from everything I see Tech Cams and other uses of technical lenses are a meaningfully sized market.

Maybe Schneider can sell the design and rights to the 60XL and 120ASPH to Rodenstock?
 
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torger

Active member
The market for "economical" and weight vs performance tradeoffs where Schneider Digitar excel was probably too narrow in the first place. Even if sensors would have been compatible I think they would have sold poorly anyway, sad but true. I liked it, but I bought almost all my gear second hand. Schneider only saw my money on the SK60XL. If high end digital backs had been like $5k rather than $30k, then the economical tradeoff niche could have worked, but digital backs has been so crazy expensive for so long time that lens cost doesn't matter that much. And the weight thing, it's important for me, but how many actually a system carry 7 lenses for 20km?

I think the big tech cam market is for those that want the best regardless costs. And best in tech cam land is best pixel peep. And that is not going to change. The only thing that's changing is that 135 is improving, which means that tech cam needs to continue keeping the distance. Alpa adds $1k (or is it $2k?) on the lens mount only, but exceptionally few really cares. Lenses can cost anything, as long as they produce the pixel peep.

It's interesting that the ASPH 120 is considered a niche lens due to that it's long. My 120 is one of my most used lenses, and my 35 is one of the least used (I do landscape)... I've long realized that I don't really match the typical tech cam client, which means that I'm not surprised when it pulls away in a direction I don't like :p

I think I'll stay in at least one more sensor, but I also think that there will be a point when 135 has enough high resolution lenses with tilt capability that it matches or exceeds 4x5" film quality (which is sort of a benchmark for me), and to keep the distance MFD tech will then move into bizarre space with ultra-heavy ultra-complex and ultra-expensive lenses, but you can always sell on being "the best". That will be the time when I move back to a smaller format, unless there's still older working MFD solutions that meets my requirements (which I hope, because I really like my Linhof...).

Oh well, US clients have more money. It's not black and white.

If we would speak to an European dealer (I have) I think the story would be slightly different although I guess that Rodie leads the way there too, but perhaps more due to compatibility. I know they do get people that are interested in budget solutions, and sometimes it ends up with 4x5" film actually. Tech cam packages with CFV-50c and Silvestri tech cams and Schneider lenses have been put together by the dealers, with very attractive prices. They are getting an increased amount of enthusiast (non-professional) clients, and many of them are interested in budget solutions. But as digital backs are so expensive, at least up to the CFV-50c, the Rodenstock vs Schneider price difference is fairly irrelevant. Rodies are not that expensive if you put the widest angles aside.

Timing has been dreadful for Schneider. Now when CMOS backs are making MFD view cameras much more attractive and drags more enthusiast budget-sensitive people into the mix (view camera solutions are soo much cheaper), the sensor is simply not compatible, and even if it was it's too late. Schneider probably decided that they would pull out a long time ago.
 
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Bryan Stephens

Workshop Member
For anyone buying lenses for tech cameras in the last three years our recommendations have been (loosely in order of frequency of purchase):
- 32HR
- 90HR-SW
- 40HR
- 60XL
- 70HR
- 120ASPH
I can attest to each of the above as I either owned or shot them all on my IQ180 and IQ260.
 

tjv

Active member
Wow, awesome posts on this thread! Thanks to everyone for carrying on the discussion while I've been away on holiday.
I need some time to digest all the above posts, so will reply properly when I get time tomorrow. In the meantime it's clear to me that a properly aligned 60XL would beat the crap out of my 55mm. I say this having just sent Paula some money for a 70HR-W! Man, at some point I need to draw the line and stop buying gear. Well... Not until I've at least bought the 40HR-W and 60XL...
 

tjv

Active member
Ok, I've finally got a little spare time to type...

Jagsiva's tests above look far better than what I'm getting with my 55 APO-SD, which I've found is no slouch within a 90-100mm IC. I'm so convinced of this I don't feel a need to inspect the raw files as the JPGs (while not displaying correctly according to Jagsiva) telll it all.

I'm really diappointed that Schneider will discontinue all tech lenses instead of keeping up with producing a few key models that sell. I also hope that Rodenstock develop a 55mm lens to replace the older APO-Sironar Digital that's a good replacement and performer on 80mpx and above sensors, while also maintaining that huge image circle. Perhaps now that Schneider is pulling out they might be motivated to develop one?

With regards to colour saturation fall off due to crosstalk, I'm yet to notice this on any images I've taken with the 55mm. I'm not saying it's not there, but I perhaps haven't shot under the exact conditions to make it jump out. What I have noticed–and maybe this is related in some way–that the LCC corrections bring out the noise, which softens details on the edges of the frame if too much of the falloff is corrected. After some practive I'm tending to back this off a little bit, say to 50-65%, just to keep the noise at bay. I like a little bit of subtle vignetting anyway.

I've just dealt with customs regarding the import of my new 70 HR-W, which I'm excited to put to the test soon. With the 100mm IC I should get some room to move with rise / fall when stitching in the format I like. I'm interested to see where exactly the hard vignette kicks in (such a stupid design decision, IMHO) and how easy it is to notice when I'm getting to close to it. As long as I get the claimed 100mm I'm happy. If I get a few more mm, I'll be very happy.

Lastly, we've talked a lot here about LCC's etc dealing with saturation, crosstalk, colour casts etc, has anyone tested C1 Pro 9 Vs 8 to see if there's any improvement in that area with the new software?
 

tjv

Active member
Ok, I've looked at a few more files and I do see the saturation fall off on big shifts. It's masked a little bit by vignetting (I turn down the automatic correction when doing the LCC) and blue sky certainly looks a little grey in the corners when doing 6x13 stitches with a big of fall of the back. Now that I see it it's disturbing me a bit, actually... Seems the 55mm might be no better than the 60XL in this regard...
 

jlm

Workshop Member
shot this with the 60k, blad cfv50-c, processed in Phocus.

any ideas about the sort of luminance flare surrounding the mast and edges of the ship?
 

tjv

Active member
Wow, that looks really odd! Never seen anything like that before...
Could it be internal reflections off the sensor?
 

tjv

Active member
Well, I received my 70 HR W and can say that it eats my 55mm APO-SD alive!

Interestingly, I can shift the back horizontally by 17mm AND drop the back by at least 12mm and still not see the hard vignette. This is when focusing at about 20m distance and at f11. Brilliant!
 
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