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Sharpness



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Lensdays is back! This video is about sharpness in lens design and photography. Sharpness is something we actually measure. It is represented in MTF charts and its actually a very important element to understanding the characteristics of a lens. Sharpness is essentially contrast between areas of detail. More defined contrast indicates a sharper photo. If we understand the sharpness of a lens we can also see possibilities in bokeh, field curvature, astigmatism and some types of chromatic aberration.

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Ted Forbes
The Art of Photography
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48 responses to “Sharpness”

  1. It is a tough subject to cover. In a forum that I am a member of, another user had an issue with one of their lenses calibration. They were sure it was fixable,and the repair agent suggest if they need a replacement, that the tamron 35 is the sharpest lens on the market currently. They returned to the forum asking for others experience with the lens.
    The tamron is M.T.F sharp..so if your planing on shooting black bulls eye's on white grounds, and carefully measuring the chromatic aberration and coma, it will excel. We ask her to return to the store and inquire about colour fidelity, colour saturation and shadow acquence (always spell that word wrong.) The sales person replied what we all knew he would. "We don't test that." To add more mud to the situation, when you look at Fuji, Canon, Nikon M.T.F charts..they aren't standarised. each uses their own testing. So a low M.T.F by one manufacture, maybe the a high score on another's. Just the same as the exposure value of 200 ISo on the fuji, canon, panasonic etc will not give the same exposure with exact settings…as the ISO/ASA for film was standardised..however it isn't standarised in digital.

  2. When dad bought me my first camera in 1978 a Yashica Electro 35 GSN he said what a luminous lens! Use it in the middle at F/8 or F/5.6 it’s where it will be at its sharpest! But what a great service this camera-lens gave to me: from high school all the way to my masters in the USA. And the pictures I made with her!

  9. BINGO! Thank you for the single BEST lens explanation I’ve ever encountered! Lenses are our paint brushes, thus it’s necessary to know what effect our instrument will have between us and what we desire to create. Brilliant +++!

  10. If you are going to use chart and graphs, please label the axes next time. I had no idea what the graph was showing. Is the x axis distance from the center in mm? Is the y axis sharpness?

  15. Lens sharpness and sensor MP count, probably the most misunderstood, over-hyped and least important things to good photography.
    I think your video makes that pretty clear, whilst doing a good job of explaining contrast "sharpness".
    Some of my favourite lenses are not rated as particularly sharp. A good example, I have a Tamron 70-300 f4-5.6 zoom. It's really cheap (even new). The expert reviews are extremely dismissive of this lens, the MTF charts are also not that impressive. But I get great images from mine, both on 35mm film and FF digital. In my experience, there are very few lenses out there you can't get great pictures form if you work to their strengths.

  16. I think it's silly to complain about a lens being too sharp! When they upgrade to bigger megapixel cameras they're going to appreciate the sharpness. It's much easier to unsharpen an image rather than the opposite.

  23. A lot to digest here, but extremely valuable. Your video helped me to 'finally' get an understanding of what the MTF charts can show us and how to read them. Your most valuable comment, however, was to not let the MTF chart be your only reference when making a choice for a lens. Ideally, I always would like to shoot a lens before purchasing to see the actual images and decide what I like/don't like about them. Thanks for sharing your knowledge!!

  26. Seems like Rokinon, Sigma, Sony, and Zeiss have some of the most consistent MTF charts across the spectrum. Nikon is all over the place in a bad way, and Canon has done magic with their telephoto lenses.
    All according to the lensrental blog. If I read all of that correctly that is.

  28. At least compared to DXOMark my tests on lenses I own vary vastly. So I don't know how I can trust them. I.e. my 8-16 is sharper than my 18-35 when both are absolutely perfectly 100% in focus at any setting. Yet DXOMark says 18-35 is 2 times sharper. That's just impossible. 18-35 is surely a very sharp lens but my 8-16 is just sharper. Any resource says otherwise will not be trustworthy to me. The-Digital-Picture, for example, matches my observation. I always seek for physical chart pictures to compare lenses and those are hard to find.

  29. Some Japanese companies produce lenses of very high contrast some call hardness (eg: Olympus) to give impression they are even sharper than Zeiss. To some eyes, contrast does not equate sharpness. Zeiss and Exata have some low contrast lenses. Leica used to have lenses of lower contrast than Zeiss.

  39. I don't know shit about MTF charts, but in the good ol' days sharpness was determined or rated by how many lines of resolution could be successfully resolved at a given distance. Had nothing to do with contrast per se (ratio of light to dark).

  45. I think the physical design of apertures would make a good video topic, particularly the count and shape of blades. not just because I'm a fan of vintage lenses with lots of blades, but also because the blade count seems to be coming back up with new lenses engineered for mirrorless bodies, and I haven't really seen that advertised other than included in the specs

  48. Good information, but given the generally excellent quality of virtually all lenses from leading manufacturers these days — including kit lenses — the chief causes of unsharpness are more likely to be camera shake, imprecise focusing, low-quality filters and the like than the contrast and resolution of the lens itself, IMO.

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