Lens testing. Canon, Nikon, Contax Zeiss, Leica-R, etc. etc.

[Samir Patel]

Sort of a giving back... some 2-3 years ago now I wanted to do this and was side-tracked over and over. I always wanted to test out some lenses in actual practice. I'm not interested in shooting test charts but instead putting lenses on a RED and into practice shooting the type of content we are accustomed to shooting. I even registered a domain back then. Lensratings.com. Along the way I needed to complete my collections of contax and leica-r etc. Well that may take forever so I'm ready to at least get started on this. So please tell me what you guys think is the most important things to see in testing of these lenses... and when I have time and assistance and can hire models, get camera setups and lighting together, i'll do it and publish the videos. More of as a repository. I knew those types of videos were so valuable to me when I was trying to find the difference between lenses when I went shopping on my own for some particular focal lengths. Let's do this... finally. Took out some of my 85's and close today and I couldn't help thinking I need to do this already...

p.s. I like those monoprice lightboxes (purchased from amazon. they make nice accent lights for small stuff like this.)

 

[Tommaso Alvisi]

Great Samir!

Thanks!

After the usual tests (all done WO plus 2.8 and maybe even 5.6):

- Resolution
- Bokeh (preferably with a busy / challenging background and maybe testing both, with a close BG and a distant BG)
- Vignetting
- Distortion
- Chromatic Aberrations (in high contrast situations)
- Spherical Aberrations (mostly WO)
- Contrast (with a special attention to Highlights retention and shadows readability)
- Color balance

I'd really like to see:

- Highlinghts blooming
- Skin texture rendition
- Breathing
- Image shift (which btw could vary between samples) while changing direction of focus (best method is with a WFF without touching the rig).
- 6K WS / HD coverage if their target image circle is s35/35