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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Announcing the S.A.L.T. (Southland Alternative Lens Test)

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Will the results be posted promptly and thoroughly unlike LART? LART *was* going to be awesome, until the results never came (or they were posted after they weren't that relevant anymore). No offense to Gibby, I'm sure his hands were tied or he was busy or something, but that was going to be awesome...and the only thing to come out of it was pics of Ketch with babes :-D

EDIT: I guess LART actually did have a results page...that was only 1 page long and was only clips.
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=6424

Not to make anyone feel bad, it seems everyone in attendance really enjoyed themselves.

I'm just hoping that the results from SALT are a bunch of well written articles that quantify and qualify things (with pics, footage, etc).

EDIT 2: Now I remember, LART was originally going to be out of the gate, then it got pushed, then the results weren't for a month or so after the event, then the "results" were just footage. Maybe it was my misunderstanding. I thought LART was going to be doing research for the larger community and it appears to have mostly been just for the people there to get more experience. Which one is SALT?
 
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  • #44
I'm keeping SALT small, professional and invite only specifically so we can reach some tangible conclusions about all this glass. Matt Urhy has made up some really nice forms for us all to use when evaluating the results. These will serve as our subjective notes. Objective tests will be published here but some consideration must be taken for time expenditure and paid work. I expect to be the sole compiler of the data, but hopefully I can rope Brook, Matt U and Matt D into doing some of the processing. I'm sure there will be a little bit of geeking out but this is not a party.
 
Shawn Nelson said:
but that was going to be awesome...and the only thing to come out of it was pics of Ketch with babes :-D
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Hi Shawn,

Remember the camera was not perfect when released and LART was done under NDA's, quite why I will never understand,

Stephen
 
Shawn Nelson said:
...and the only thing to come out of it was pics of Ketch with babes :-D
Click to expand...

David Mullen, Finner and I were hidden in a back room and actually did a few meaningful tests at LART, just by the time it was out from under embargo there was no point.

SALT's results should be quite a bit quicker than that. The idea is to be comprehensive, definitive and timely. We'll see if it works but that's what were going for.

Matt Uhry
www.mattuhry.com
 
Stephen Williams said:
Hi Shawn,

Remember the camera was not perfect when released and LART was done under NDA's, quite why I will never understand,

Stephen
Click to expand...

Matt Uhry said:
David Mullen, Finner and I were hidden in a back room and actually did a few meaningful tests at LART, just by the time it was out from under embargo there was no point.
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Thats right! It was the NDAs that really killed the usefullness of it and made it much more about who was there than who was waiting for reports.

Matt Uhry said:
SALT's results should be quite a bit quicker than that. The idea is to be comprehensive, definitive and timely. We'll see if it works but that's what were going for.

Matt Uhry
www.mattuhry.com
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Excellent Matt! I'm glad to hear that.
 
Excellent to see this about to happen. Hats off to all involved.

One thing, how do you intend to publish the results?
For comparing results will I be able to, say import pics into Photoshop and create my own comparisons....or what?

D
 
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That haven't been defined but some untouched frames will be available I hope.
With the lens projector tests you're gonna have to take our word for it.

Mostly I hope to generate consensus opinions about the "feel" of each of these lenses, I fully expect them all to be sharp.
 
I trust you guys better than I trust myself, no problem there.
But seeing you guys are going to so much trouble a stills camera/slate setup on projector would preserve all that effort forever. Like your IR works. It's great, people loved it.
I'd pour over those images forever....either via download, $Disk.
Seeing stills for colour matching would also be great. Think about it.
D
 
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david farland said:
But seeing you guys are going to so much trouble a stills camera/slate setup on projector would preserve all that effort forever. D
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The problem is that with a lens projector is every focal length has different coverage and even if you took a photo it would never resolve enough to really tell anything. I'll give it a shot with my D3, but I doubt it'll be very useful.
 
What I find more useful are comparisons, because it's all relative to each other -- for example how different lenses at the same f-stop look pointed at the same chart. Some sort of "objective truth" about a lens (other than its basic specs like lens coverage) is less practical to me than simply knowing how it stacks up against its competition in different shooting scenarios, like wide-open, etc.
 
I agree with David - but maybe regarding the projection of lenses we can figure out a impartial way to express distortion, resolution fall off, and illumination fall off. Maybe Matt Duclos knows a good way to do that.

I don't think a re-shot image of the lens projector wall is going to be much use, except maybe as a guide for distortion ?

Matt Uhry
www.mattuhry.com
 
Shawn Nelson said:
...and the only thing to come out of it was pics of Ketch with babes :-D
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...And I helped take some of those pictures, too. :thumbsup:

But yeah, like Matt said, the little bit of meaningful stuff that came out of LART was pretty much old news by the time we could post about it. For many of us who attended, it was our real first hands-on with the early cameras. I learned a bunch by attending about various issues of the time. OLPF issues, compression artifacts, black flares and black streaking with over-exposure, lots of things you probably saw yourself with your early RED. But RED was just about to start shipping the "X" cameras when LART happened and we even had an "X" camera at LART -- I believe it was Manny's camera, since it had just been repaired / rebuilt by RED a few days prior and had the new OLPF...

LART was in many ways more of an invite-only RED users group meet than a concise bunch of testing. But in the end it did provide some useful information and I like to think that RED did get some good feedback from the event.
 
BTW.. When is SALT? Is there any confirmed list of new primes that will be included in the testing?
 
Matthew Duclos said:
Yup.. A well aligned projector and my eye..
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So now we have a good impartial way to measure the result, which I believe was never an issue, be good to have an accurate/impatial way to express the detail of those results.
Why I thought stills would be good was not to maintain openness or have a level of public scrutiny on how you ran or graded the test. You guys will nail both.
It's because histortically on this forum when someone reports the fringing is below par or the gears are crunchy or breathing is a problem, we immediately become very critical. Or when we say this was the best or worse we don't often have an idea of 'degree'.
Lots of abberrations get reported, but they may not be a problem to a lot of other people. It's a matter of degree & personal acceptance
It's what you read and not see that make it heard to appraise for yourself.
So I figured having some results which showed the different level of fringing/rolloff may let people decide that they're quite happy with the second last lens in a particular criteria.

..feel very confident that 'you' are the guys actually doing this tests. Just want to get as much public gain out of them as possible..

D
 
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