On 9/28/05, swisspace <swisspace@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Maybe that is also the attraction to the OM line and its zuiko's and not
> the blind belief that progress is automatically better. sorry but it
> will take a lot to convince me that a top of the line lens of the 80's
> is worse than modern glass.
In terms of glass quality, I think it's a question of looking at what
the advancements have been since then. The big 3 that I can think of
are AF, zooms and digital. If some manufacturers (i.e. Lei€a and
¢ontax) are to be believed, designing AF lenses can create some
compromises in quality (hence why ¢ontax's first AF camera was the AX
which moved the film plane and why Lei€a still hasn't made an AF SLR
or RF camera). If that's the case then R&D effort would have been
expended to improve the quality to match manual focus lenses (and I'd
say they've done that). Even without quality tradeoffs there was still
a lot of R&D work on improving AF performance. Given a finite R&D
budget that means less money going to improving the optical designs.
Zooms weren't anything new but the advancement has been in improving
the quality and in expanding the zoom range. It wasn't that long ago
when the rule of thumb was to stick to a 2x range in focal lengths. So
that optical design money mentioned above wasn't going to improving
the quality of prime lenses but instead went to making zooms that are
as good as primes. I'd say you could make the case for some of the
high-end zooms matching the quality of prime lenses in the same range
(or at least the zoom matching them at certain focal lengths). But,
the challenge now is to keep pushing the envelope in terms of extreme
zooms and getting their quality better.
The final advancement is digital. What I mean by this is that digital
has changed the way manufacturers need to design their lenses. There
are simply issues that didn't exist with film (like the angle the
light hits the sensor or needing to coat more surfaces to prevent
reflections off the sensor from bouncing around the light path).
This is a very long winded way of me saying that I agree with you.
Perhaps in the future manufacturers will get back to pushing the
quality envelope but I suspect it will be with high-end zooms, not
primes.
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