was there ever a good slr zoom lens?

138S · Jan 6, 2020

blockend said:
Are you saying lenses designed in the digital era that fit Canon EOS film cameras are off limits because they were made for digital cameras? That seems a fundamentalist stance even for this forum.

Digital photography changed design optimizarion rules. For example today more image distortion can be allowed if this is useful to correct better other features, as distorion is easily corrected digitally. Also color fringes are easily corrected by using slightly different distortion corrections maps for each channel, so spheric correction can be better priorized. Still lateral Color aberration cannot be easily corrected separately than longitudial one. Also it happens with secondary color aberration (green-magenta fringes).

Lens manufacturing technology has made substantial leaps forward that are only found in digital lens, in special if we focus on quality-cost ratio, in the past extraordinary lenses could be done but same performance level is today way cheaper.

In the high end product range we have seen substantial design change in pro zooms. In the past that VR 2.8 pro glass tended to be Parfocal design, today those zooms are Varifocal type, making a lighter, cheaper (manufacturing) an better desing, with one intrinsic flaw: "focus breathing", but electronics solve that, as we move focus the zoom position is servocontroled to hold magnification in place.

Yes... digital photography evolution made lenses better for digital, but not always this is good for film, if distortion is higher...

Anyway what is better is about personal preferences, to me a near century old 36cm Universal Heliar is better, I would sell all VRs I could have to pay one of those . Well, preferences are about the kind of sickness one may have

markjwyatt · Jan 6, 2020

My understanding is that digital sensors do not do well with off-axis light, implying a lot of the glass in "modern" lenses is to be sure that all rays are perpendicular to the sensor, even at the edges. Not sure if this hurts film or not, but not sure it helps either.

138S · Jan 6, 2020

markjwyatt said:
My understanding is that digital sensors do not do well with off-axis light, implying a lot of the glass in "modern" lenses is to be sure that all rays are perpendicular to the sensor, even at the edges. Not sure if this hurts film or not, but not sure it helps either.

This is less a problem in DX cropped sensors with mirror cameras, as flange to sensor has to allow anyway the mirror in the middle. It may have more effect in a FX (full format) mirrorless with extra short focals, sure desing may solve it with some additional glass in the rear.

Anyway it was reported the counter, that short focals had a problem with mirror cameras because mirror placed glass too far for a good short focal design.

blockend · Jan 6, 2020

138S said:
For example today more image distortion can be allowed if this is useful to correct better other features, as distorion is easily corrected digitally.

I made this point in this thread or another similar one. Unfortunately the mere mention of the D word makes some people apoplectic, leading to convoluted circumnavigations of the subject at hand.

138S said:
in the past extraordinary lenses could be done but same performance level is today way cheaper

Yes, old designs required a tome of logarithms, whereas a lens's optical characteristics are well known and available at the touch of a mouse.

138S said:
Yes... digital photography evolution made lenses better for digital, but not always this is good for film, if distortion is higher...

It's a truism that good older lenses were optically correct but less sharp. Obviously there were exceptions. Today there are few un-sharp lenses, even among kit zooms. The difference now is it's easier to test for their failings. I'd argue that neither sharpness nor optical correction are especially important unless the job involves copywork or brick walls. Unfortunately that's where many lenses are tested.

138S said:
Anyway what is better is about personal preferences, to me a near century old 36cm Universal Heliar is better, I would sell all VRs I could have to pay one of those .

As I've noted repeatedly, unless the application is medical, surveillance or astronomical, lens performance is entirely subjective. There's no such thing as a bad lens, just inappropriate subjects. I won't be selling the Taylor Hobsons, Wollensak, pre-AI Nikkors, 3-element Schneiders...

Russ - SVP · Jan 6, 2020

jtk said:
I don't think anybody's 35mm zoom lens was ever as good as their prime kit lenses, and certainly not nearly as good as their digital lenses.

I'm looking for something good for a gathering-dust Pentax.

Many.

StepheKoontz · Jan 6, 2020

blockend said:
I'd argue that neither sharpness nor optical correction are especially important unless the job involves copywork or brick walls. Unfortunately that's where many lenses are tested.

So true. One of my favorite modern optics, the nikkor 58mm f1.4G was crucified in the media basically because it wasn't a good lens for copying flat artwork wide open... In use, shooting a 3D world, it is simply amazing.

138S · Jan 6, 2020

blockend said:
I'd argue that neither sharpness nor optical correction are especially important unless the job involves copywork or brick walls. Unfortunately that's where many lenses are tested.

I agree... most of real scenes are in a 3D field, and perhaps little is in the perfect focus. If we shot a distant mountain (all in perfect focus) on a tripod then a better lens may show a difference, but a 4K monitor has 8MPix anyway, and a print has to be really big to show a difference. ...to me the greatest feature is bokeh, but mileage may vary

It is way more important how we use the lens than the lens itself, I guess.

In fact a wet plate from 1885 had more resolution than today's best gear, surpassing 100MPix effective http://hubicka.blogspot.com/2016/03/resolution-of-historical-photographs-in.html

But by 1910 they had well realized that photographs were too sharp for portraits, so they investigated how a nice depiction could be made, by 1926 Universal Heliar was born, they placed a ring in the 1902 Heliar to displace the internal element out of it's optimal place...

Now we are going a bit in the wrong direction: sharpness, sharpness and sharpness... OK, sharpness can be a good aesthetic tool, but mainstream forget many powerful resources from glass.

I guess that a bit it's like music, an old barroque violin can deliver a way more sophisticated expression than best music generating software...

Not complaining about technical advances, at all, only saying that something was lost in translation...

blockend · Jan 6, 2020

StepheKoontz said:
the nikkor 58mm f1.4G was crucified in the media basically because it wasn't a good lens for copying flat artwork wide open...

My first proper job was operating a horizontal process camera. The camera back was a darkroom. The lens was excellent at copying artwork but mediocre for anything else. Horses for courses.

138S said:
but a 4K monitor has 8MPix anyway

Don't poke the tiger..

138S said:
Now we are going a bit in the wrong direction: sharpness, sharpness and sharpness

Part of the prejudice against d****** photography is its descriptive exactitude. For creative photography, description is not the most prized asset, even for inherently descriptive genres like landscape. A photograph can visually infer and suggest with photo-mechanical-chemical compromises throughout the process, none of which prioritise the representation of absolute detail. A "good" photograph evokes a visceral experience in which visual description is a starting point, not the destination.

Luckless · Jan 6, 2020

138S said:
Now we are going a bit in the wrong direction: sharpness, sharpness and sharpness... OK, sharpness can be a good aesthetic tool, but mainstream forget many powerful resources from glass.

I'm not sure I would call it 'moving in the wrong direction' - One can always use any number of tools to back off from overall sharpness if you have more than you need, but adding sharpness when you find it is lacking is a far different kettle of fish.

Then there is always the general 'generational drifting' to account for. The common trend of 'modern' photography of any given decade is to not have the same look and feel of the previous last few decades. Like any fashion things that seemed like a good idea at the time will eventually be viewed as terrible compared to what is being done 'today', and the cycle will forever continue.

[I'm only mid 30's, and try to keep an open mind on styles, but I suspect I'll happily slip into crotchety-old-man mood before too long.]

blockend · Jan 6, 2020

Luckless said:
The common trend of 'modern' photography of any given decade is to not have the same look and feel of the previous last few decades.

Hmm, I reckon one of the tropes of modern commercial photography, is to look as close to 1970s Vogue as possible. From Helmut Newton to Sarah Moon.

138S · Jan 6, 2020

Luckless said:
I'm not sure I would call it 'moving in the wrong direction' - One can always use any number of tools to back off from overall sharpness if you have more than you need, but adding sharpness when you find it is lacking is a far different kettle of fish.

Then there is always the general 'generational drifting' to account for. The common trend of 'modern' photography of any given decade is to not have the same look and feel of the previous last few decades. Like any fashion things that seemed like a good idea at the time will eventually be viewed as terrible compared to what is being done 'today', and the cycle will forever continue.

[I'm only mid 30's, and try to keep an open mind on styles, but I suspect I'll happily slip into crotchety-old-man mood before too long.]

Well, perhaps I should have not said 'moving in the wrong direction'. What I wanted to mean is that advertising , DxO and etc only speaks about peak effective pixels that in most of the situations are irrelevant because we have other limitations like focus in a 3D scene, while other features like bokeh are not even mentioned.

New pro lenses could have a DC ring like DC 135, or an adjustment to generate swirl bokeh, or a diffusion ring to adjust a refined spheric aberration... but evolution is only technical and not aesthetic. Probably there is no enough commercial demand for that.

My view is that at some point we may see an increased interest for the old techniques, a bit that film revival points to that.

Digital capture an digital edition made a great push in this art, but many times we have: Thesis, antithesis, synthesis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis,_antithesis,_synthesis )

Perhaps now we are in the antithesis of film era, and next will be a sinthesis of the digital + "film era" in the aesthetics. I'm speaking like a prophet but only guessing !

jtk · Jan 6, 2020

zoom praise plus update:

All the praise Vivitar et al received for their best zooms related to sharpness. However, from my point of view, the reason zooms have been problematic is MECHANICAL. Zooms wear out mechanically. We all know that. If you've had a chance to evaluate contemporary zooms you'll see that they benefit from lightweight construction. Carbon construction means they don't wear out nearly as quickly as their bronze-age (and little screws) helical ancestors.

UPDATE... Here's why I've been using my various mint-condition Pentax primes on my digital cameras: they're FAST.

Pentax 50/2.5 K Macro, Pentax 50/1.4 K, Pentax 85/2.0, Pentax 28/2.8 K... I don't know who wants to pay for digital zooms that fast and there's no way I want to haul gigantic film camera zooms around. So I've determined to keep my Pentax primes (all tiny by comparison to Canikon) with Fotasy adapters for my 30mp Samsung cameras. When I'm willing to work with a lens as slow as f3.5 I can always switch to optically stabilized Samsung zooms. And Samsung's pancakes are amazing optically.

Samsung is of course out of the camera business...it will be interesting to watch Canikon attempting to stay in it against superior engineering from Fuji et al.

jtk · Jan 6, 2020

blockend said:
Hmm, I reckon one of the tropes of modern commercial photography, is to look as close to 1970s Vogue as possible. From Helmut Newton to Sarah Moon.

Helmut and Sarah, both convincingly dead, are far from "modern commercial photographers."

138S · Jan 6, 2020

jtk said:
Helmut and Sarah, both convincingly dead, are far from "modern commercial photographers."

Well, also most of "modern commercial photographers" are quite far to have their work edited in a SUMO by Taschen

...but I feel that Newton's work, if it was made today, it would be as innovative or more that it was then.

David A. Goldfarb · Jan 6, 2020

When I’ve owned a zoom—and I don’t currently—it’s been usually a medium wide-to-short tele for event photography, where the advantage of a zoom is to be able to react quickly to something interesting, when you can’t always stand in the ideal position and change lenses before the scene disappears (like two people in an animated conversation where you can see both of their faces with their eyes open), so I don’t really see the zoom vs. prime comparisons as useful for the way I use a zoom lens. The full frame zoom image is likely to be better than the cropped prime image, presuming the prime lens is wide enough to capture the content in question, and of course the image you get is better than the one you missed.

If you want to replace prime lenses with zoom lenses for the sake of economy or to reduce the number of lenses in the bag, that’s a different story.

blockend · Jan 6, 2020

jtk said:
Helmut and Sarah, both convincingly dead, are far from "modern commercial photographers."

Methinks you missed the point.

Ariston · Jan 6, 2020

If people are looking at the corners of your photo to see if they are soft, then the performance of your zoom lens is definitely not your biggest problem!

Luckless · Jan 6, 2020

Ariston said:
If people are looking at the corners of your photo to see if they are soft, then the performance of your zoom lens is definitely not your biggest problem!

Just fill the edges of your frame with deliberately out of focus elements, and scream random Japanese words at anyone who offers negative sounding feedback?

tomkatf · Jan 6, 2020

When used properly, I loved and got great results with the older Nikon 80-200 f/4.5...

Russ - SVP · Jan 6, 2020

There was a plethora of quality zooms.

AndyH · Jan 7, 2020

jtk said:
Helmut and Sarah, both convincingly dead, are far from "modern commercial photographers."

As Coroner I must aver,
I thoroughly examined her.
And she's not only merely dead,
she's really most sincerely dead.

Sincerely,
Andy

blockend · Jan 8, 2020

My point, lest anyone missed it, is a great deal of current commercial photography apes the appearance of film photography and its erstwhile exponents. Some is actually shot on film, a lot is film-lookalike. The documentary appearance of a photographer such as Helmut Newton and twilight mist of Sarah Moon is alive and well in 2020 magazines.

Deleted member 88956 · Jan 14, 2020

138S said:
Well, also most of "modern commercial photographers" are quite far to have their work edited in a SUMO by Taschen

...but I feel that Newton's work, if it was made today, it would be as innovative or more that it was then.

Jeanloup Sieff would have blown away every single fashion photographer since his passing (and most who lived along with him).

Somehow a question over good zoom lenses turned into digital garbage talk and while digital has brought in some amazing technology, it has also sterilized how photography is evaluated and what is actually important in its visual impact.

eli griggs · Jan 14, 2020

I had a Canon FD 20 -35mm 'L' Series lens that gave some of the nicest B&W images I ever took, With any lens and that includes the Hasselblad CF50.

Shoot a roll in Tri-x 400, rated 200, and HC110, dil.H, and it rendered stunning results.
I'd love to have this lens today, it was that nice.

IMO.

benjiboy · Jan 14, 2020

I have the Canon FD 20-35 3.5 L zoom lens as well as the Canon FD 20, 24,28 and 35mm prime lenses and although in absolute terms the prime lenses are faster and marginally sharper at some apertures the wide-angle zoom gives excellent sharp colourful images, is very convenient, and weighs 4 1/2 lbs less than the prime lenses in total.

was there ever a good slr zoom lens?

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