Along this line of history, Nikon established its reputation for
lenses by making a normal lens for Leica cameras which were the small
journalism camera of the day. It was cheaper and sharper than the
Leica and they sold like hot cakes to photo journalists of the day.
That was before computers were used for lens design though. Having
lived through that period my impression was that the main advantage
of computers was to do the calculations more quickly that a company
like Leitz did on paper making it easier to pop out new, less
expensive, lenses more frequently. I think improvements in lens
design have more to do with coatings, new glasses, and the ability to
make aspherical surfaces.
The philosophy of lens design has something to do with it as well. It
is just in the past few years that the Japanese identified bokeh as
something significant to worry about and more recent lenses take it
into account in their design, but the look of the whole image has
been a long time interest by Leica and Zeiss. The new Zeiss lenses
have been discussed recently on this list and on the net. Zeiss is
definitely going for a "look" and not just resolution. That is valid
too.
As for sharpness and contrast, I think if you go to a site like
photodo.com you will find that while there are some great lenses from
the Japanese companies, there are lots of dogs as well. The ones from
Leica and Zeiss are much more consistently very good.
All of which is to say that enthusiasm for what you use is great. It
is all good.
Winsor
Long Beach, California, USA
On / October 2, 2007 CE, at 9:10 AM, David Irisarri wrote:
> If he reads a little bit about Carl Zeiss, he could discover
> that after second world war this company was the best designing lenses
> and coattings but when Japanesse companies entered in the market and
> computers started to help engineers to make compact lenses with
> same if
> not higher resolution, Carl Zeiss left to be the only one.
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