MF Digital Precision

[Guy Mancuso]

The 35 lux does have issues . Leica told me that also but Tim you have to compare lenses that fall in the same focal length or effective focal length. In the MF world that is a 21mm depending on back of course but the only lens we can compare here is the Rodenstock to make any sense at all. It's a great lens but I don't know about the corners myself. I think this is where the confusion is a 35mm Schnieder will always be better than a 28mm regardless who makes it the longer the lens the less of a corner issue. For you that is the lens you should have on the Cambo not the Mamiya 28mm

 

[Jack]

but Tim you have to compare lenses that fall in the same focal length or effective focal length.

Exactly... The 28 Cron on the M8 is equivalent to the 55 in front of my Phase, and I'll stack that final file up against anything made with an equivalent focal on any smaller sensor

Cheers,

 

[Francois_A]

Mamiya can make great wide angles; for instance the 43mm for the Mamiya 7 is very sharp in the corners. Building a great retrofocus wide angle for reflex cameras is inherently more complicated; so the comparison is unfair IMHO.

 

[KeithL]

I don't have the Hasselbald lens but I was sent an example of it's output as being a really good file and a ringing endorsment of its powers by someone from Hasselblad who was being extremely helpful. It was without any doubt soft in the corners. As have every example of every Mammy 28D I have ever seen been, whether taken by me or by anyone else.
Tim

Tim, I've no personal experience of the Mamiya 28D and therefore wouldn't dream of passing judgement on it. I never judge a lens based on third party output.

My HCD 28mm is as good or bad as I make it. When I get it wrong the results suck, but it's my fault and is no reflection on the lens. Get it right and I can see no softening of the corners.

I won't be using this lens for landscape, not because the lens isn't suited, but because I hate wide lens landscapes, hate the perspective, much preferring the natural perspective of standard lenses. The 28mm will never leave dank, dark and narrow Greek alleyways; one almost feels sorry for it.

Keith

 

[tashley]

Mamiya can make great wide angles; for instance the 43mm for the Mamiya 7 is very sharp in the corners. Building a great retrofocus wide angle for reflex cameras is inherently more complicated; so the comparison is unfair IMHO.

Sorry Francois but I cannot agree.

There are two propositions here.

1) The 28D is a great lens, sharp to the corners. Not true.
2) The 28D is a great lens given the technical constraints. True.

I'm not interested in fair, to be honest. I want one very, very simple thing: I want anyone who is considering purchasing an MFD system to know that coughing up a pile of dough does not buy visual nirvana. If you want to get the best performance out of a P45+ or equivalent back using wide angle lenses, you will most likely have to get a tech camera and a lens that isn't built around a mirror.

I cannot see anyone really trying to disagree with this.

Tim

 

[tashley]

Tim, I've no personal experience of the Mamiya 28D and therefore wouldn't dream of passing judgement on it. I never judge a lens based on third party output.

My HCD 28mm is as good or bad as I make it. When I get it wrong the results suck, but it's my fault and is no reflection on the lens. Get it right and I can see no softening of the corners.

I won't be using this lens for landscape, not because the lens isn't suited, but because I hate wide lens landscapes, hate the perspective, much preferring the natural perspective of standard lenses. The 28mm will never leave dank, dark and narrow Greek alleyways; one almost feels sorry for it.

Keith

Keith, I appreciate the good manners and good humour of your reply, thank you.

My minor disagreement is that we all judge lenses in two stages:

1) Review and recommendation followed by...
2) Purchase and personal assessment.

I'm simply trying to square the circle between my 2) and the next punter's 1) so that people know what they might realistically expect!

And if you ever post a sharp shot of the dark corners of a Greek alleyway I will personally put dust on your sensor!

;-)

Tim

 

[tashley]

Exactly... The 28 Cron on the M8 is equivalent to the 55 in front of my Phase, and I'll stack that final file up against anything made with an equivalent focal on any smaller sensor

Cheers,

Jack,

A 28 is a 28 is a 28.

It's FOV may vary as the image capture device onto which it projects varies in size but its focal length does not.

My proposition (which I know in fact that you and Guy both agree with in general) is merely that the 28D cannot project sufficiently well to the P45+ sensor's ability to resolve its own corners.

It can be cropped, you can frame wider to account for that, you can sharpen in post, you can adjust the capture angle upwards or you can just hope no one notices but....

"if you shoot the 28D on a P45+ with a dead levelled tripod at average male eye height and F16 on flat ground you will get soft corners unless you shift the focus distance ring so as to blur infinity"

As I've posted elsewhere in this thread, 'soft' is relative. So I should qualify the above by saying that 'soft (to me) corners'.

 

[tashley]

The 35 lux does have issues . Leica told me that also but Tim you have to compare lenses that fall in the same focal length or effective focal length. In the MF world that is a 21mm depending on back of course but the only lens we can compare here is the Rodenstock to make any sense at all. It's a great lens but I don't know about the corners myself. I think this is where the confusion is a 35mm Schnieder will always be better than a 28mm regardless who makes it the longer the lens the less of a corner issue. For you that is the lens you should have on the Cambo not the Mamiya 28mm

I'll go out on a limb here: if I put a 23 Rodi on the Cambo it will have sharper corners than the 28D.

All I am saying is that building wides around mirror boxes involves compromises and that these compromises mean you will not get the best the sensor can deliver. In other words, the results will be softer in the corners than is possible with other uses of the same sensor. It's not about fair, it's not about value, it's just about optics!

 

[Guy Mancuso]

Tim no one said any different I have been saying all along it's a awesome 30mm lens. Which translates into a 22 or 23mm/ 35mm focal length equivalent on your back as well as mine. What I am saying is there are only 3 lenses in MF with that focal length that compare against each other , no other lens matters in any focal length and on any system. With that I am out of this conversation.

 

[Jack]

Agreed... Tim, you are now tilting at windmills.

 

[tashley]

Agreed... Tim, you are now tilting at windmills.

yup, because them windmills have got four arms and they keep on comin'!

:salute:

 

[carstenw]

Tim, I have started thinking about saving for the S2 and you might want to do the same Pixels which are as sharp in the corners as in the middle are hard to find in the perfect package (Cambo doesn't focus). As much as I love the entire photographic process, there are too many limitations getting in the way of the vision here, IMO. I won't be buying on day 1 though. First of all, I won't have the cash by then Secondly, I want to see that things get done right. But that is where my hope is right now.

 

[fotografz]

Tim, I have started thinking about saving for the S2 and you might want to do the same Pixels which are as sharp in the corners as in the middle are hard to find in the perfect package (Cambo doesn't focus). As much as I love the entire photographic process, there are too many limitations getting in the way of the vision here, IMO. I won't be buying on day 1 though. First of all, I won't have the cash by then Secondly, I want to see that things get done right. But that is where my hope is right now.

Why would an S2 solve the problem that Tim has highlighted? Did I misunderstand, and the S2 is a giant rangefinder without a mirror box? Do not the same optical limitations apply to Leica as any other maker of SLR type MFD cameras? Most of all, IF expectations are higher than delivery, there's no putting the S2 on a view-camera.

I think this is a matter of degree of expectation. When I put my Schneider 28/2.8 digitar on the Rollei Xact-II my expectations are higher than with the HC-28/4 on the H3D-II ... using the same 39 meg digital back.

However, I also know the HC-28 is no slouch, and neither is my HC-35 mm. I control tested the 35 against a Ziess 40CFE on the same camera/back, and the HC lens trounced the Zeiss at the edges (I now have the Ziess 40IF, and need to repeat that test again.) My expectation for the H3D-II system are not low, just tempered with the knowledge that there are some compromises being made in the name of speed and versatility ... I'm not good enough to shoot spontaneous, wider angle environmental action portraits with a Rollei Xact :ROTFL:

On another note, I have a Rodenstock 120 APO digital macro, (the second one BTW, because the first one was disappointing and couldn't be shimmed to fix it either) ... and without using T/S my HC 120/4 Macro outperforms it in every way. :wtf: Next stop is a Schneider 120 macro to see if it might be better ... IF the image circle can accommodate severe tilts for macro tabletop work.

 

[tashley]

Tim, I have started thinking about saving for the S2 and you might want to do the same Pixels which are as sharp in the corners as in the middle are hard to find in the perfect package (Cambo doesn't focus). As much as I love the entire photographic process, there are too many limitations getting in the way of the vision here, IMO. I won't be buying on day 1 though. First of all, I won't have the cash by then Secondly, I want to see that things get done right. But that is where my hope is right now.

I have to say I am sorely tempted... I see no real reasons for staying with a P45+/Phamiya combination. I think the sensor is amazing but the body sucks and wider lenses, as all my windmill tilting display me to think, lose you the edges. At least in my case. In which case there is no MP advantage (after the cropping of soft areas) over the S2.

The reason for staying with the Phase back over the S2, though, is the Cambo/Schneider combination that allows stitching to create 80mp files. Since the movements are on the back there's no need for messing about with nodal point stuff, which is a benefit but since I've never tried it, it might be easier than I think.

WRT focus the Cambo is generally but not always ok: at least with the 35XL you just use F16 and pull focus a touch back from infinity and you have a nicely sharp image from about 1.5 metres away to infinity. The Schneider is a great lens.

If the S2 is all it's cracked to be, especially if the higher ISO performance is good, and if I can get my head around nodal point shooting, I'll ditch the phase gear in a heartbeat: I like wide angles and unfortunately what with design constraints and QC issues it seem hard to get good results from lenses shorter than about 50mm. But my 80mm and 150mm lenses are very very sharp indeed and produce files that make you go 'oooooh!'

Anopther advantage would be the ability to sell my 5DII and glass which, together with all the MF gear would go a long way towards paying for an S2 setup...

Hmmm...

;-)

Tim

 

[carstenw]

Marc, I understand about expectations and compromises, but Tim has indicated that he is not interested in them, he just wants the absolute best results possible, and that means corners as sharp as the center. The S2 with lenses from Leica may achieve this. Given Leica's existing lenses, which are generally sharp from wide open, and in the case of the very wide angles, sharp when stopped down a little, I think it is not unreasonable to expect something great there. Yes, one might have to try a couple of copies. Leica is of course subject to the same physical laws, but it is in the nature of the company not to seek compromises, but to go all out, so the 24mm super wide, for example, I expect to be sharper (and more expensive) than the Mamiya and even the Hasselblad equivalents.

 

[carstenw]

Tim, there is the 30mm T/S coming up at some point. This is all in the future, and there is clearly some unfounded optimism involved, but I am crossing my fingers. The ISO performance will almost certainly be better than for the P45+, if for no other reason than it is a much newer design.

 

[woodyspedden]

Mamiya can make great wide angles; for instance the 43mm for the Mamiya 7 is very sharp in the corners. Building a great retrofocus wide angle for reflex cameras is inherently more complicated; so the comparison is unfair IMHO.

I would stack up the Mamiya 7II 43mm lens against almost any wide angle out there. It is expensive to be sure and of course works only on the Mamiya film bodies. But it is worthwhile to compare what can be done in this realm and hope that the MFDB folks (Hassy and Phase) come up with lenses of similar performance

Woody

 

[jlm]

re: nodal point panos:

the way you find that you are swinging about the nodal point is to check the images from two over-lapped frames. what you are looking for is no parallax change, best seen by examining the relationship between a near and a far object (like two posts that are lined up but one in the foreground, one in the distance).
the point here being that if you are shooting landscapes, typically there is no close foreground, so parallax is not an issue and you can pan about almost any axis with no visible bad effects

 

[carstenw]

Jim, that is true to some extent, but when using a super-wide, there is always the ground you are standing on... I see this when using the Leica 16-18-21 at 16mm (with your filter adapter ), and there are pavement cracks or flowers or anything really, which is noticeable and close to the camera.

 

[Jack]

Re parallax, you can check it for a pan-stich through the VF of an SLR before the capture since you are viewing through the lens... And yes, a camera with back shifts automatically does them parallax-free since with shift-stitches you are essentially moving the back across the lens' IC.

Tim, FWIW *either* method is easy to do once you get your head around the process. I captured the 4-frames for the pano I showed earlier in this thread in under 30 seconds. Frankly, doing captures for focus blending takes more time because of the focus precision required.

Cheers,