I couldn't see it mentioned anywhere, but anyone interested in (*some of*) the (*potential*) differences between 'film-era' lenses and 'digital era' lenses might consider reading the following few articles:
https://wordpress.lensrentals.com/b...in-the-path-sensor-stacks-and-adapted-lenses/
https://www.lensrentals.com/blog/2014/06/sensor-stack-thickness-when-does-it-matter/
Yes, there *can be* problems observed when putting film-era lenses on digital cameras (yes, I know this is the opposite of what the OP was asking, but trust me, I'm getting to it).
Especially wider-angles lenses, especially on short flange-distances mounts (mirrorless), but even more especially on micro 4/3rds.
In short, different sensors have different thicknesses of glass in front of them (for whatever reason), that bend the light again, *after* it has left the lens, and shows up as weird colour-fringing in the corners (when using lenses not designed for it).
The tl;dr of it is this:
The thickness of glass in front of a digital sensor is acting like a 'second rear element', changing the optical formula of *every* lens that's put in front of it. The thinner the glass, the more 'film-like' they perform.
That's no problem for digital cameras, *if you redesign the lens to account for this glass*, and that's what they do (see below), and that's what the OP is really asking: "do these new designs that take the sensor glass into account as another rear-element perform worse on film that lenses that were designed for film in the first place?"
Well, yes and no.
Certainly wider-angle lenses that are designed for the hugely thick glass on micro 4/3rds will have a hard time on film (but given that there are no film cameras that can fit these, they only cover a half-frame at best, trying to even adapt one of these to a film-frankencamera is insanity, so that's just a non-issue).
Voigtlander LTM/M lenses? I'm pretty sure they were all 'designed for film' as Mr Kobayashi is a big film fan, and they never made a digital camera (why design your lenses for someone else's digital camera?). You just need to look at all the posts complaining about trying to use these lenses on digital to realise that they were 'made for film'.
Leica Lenses? Probably not, they designed their digital cameras to mimic their huge back catalogue of film lenses, hence they have the thinnest sensor glass of anything in Roger's tables. So even their newest lenses now have to match not only their digital cameras but their legions of fans with old Leica film bodies (full credit to Leica lens engineers for managing to pull this off).
Back to the OP, Nikon (or even Canon) DSLR-era lenses? Well, their digital bodies look to have some *fairly thin* glass all round. More importantly, their *top* bodies (D1/1D etc) have the *thinnest* sensor glass. That says (to me) that they are trying to make their *best cameras* look better with *the widest range* of lenses, film lenses included. So why would they then go and redesign *new* (digital-era) lenses that look *worse* on their *best* new digital bodies? Doesn't make sense to me.
(Certainly they have more freedom with their 'digital-only' lines (EF-s, DX-format), if you could use them on a film camera I'm sure they would perform worse.)
Maybe for their Full-frame (real 35mm size) lenses they take a tiny bit of the effect of sensor-glass into account? Probably, they'd be stupid not to. But every engineering design is a compromise of objectives, and we can never know exactly what they're targetting without asking them.
But can you tell the difference anyway?
Especially when using a 'long' lens like 85mm?
Are you shooting Kodachrome 25 with a tripod set in concrete and enlarging to 4'x6' with a Super-Apo-Rodagon-HM-XL ? Yeah, you might see a difference...
(Also, as Alan just pointed out, there are a lot of corrections you can do digitally, I've seen reviews of people comparing the 'lens corrections' on and off, and for some of the cheaper bodies the 'lens correction off' photos are just absolute shite. But then the 'lens correction on' photos are also not as good as they could be, more post-processing just increases noise and/or decreases resolution, there's no substitute for good lens-design no matter what camera you're designing for).
Balancing all of this, of course, is lets just ignore the sensor-glass for a while and think about how much Computer Aided Design and fancy-glass manufacturing techniques have increased the quality of *top* designs in the last 20 years. Also balance that against the 'race to the bottom' to make cheaper and cheaper lenses. As always, you get what you pay for. No question a top-of-the-line lens that's 50 years old (I'm looking at you, Takumar and Summicrons) would easily outperform a cheapo-plastic lens designed yesterday, just as much as a new Otus would beat the pants off a POS from 50 years ago, no matter how you're capturing the image.
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! And that is of course nonsense
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! Because of its weight!
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