What is lens character?

How would that even be possible?

Great definition to character, imparting a unique quality.

Some interesting replies.

Character is not always about obvious lens defects.

I bought a Curious lens whilst wasting time surfing the net looking for a better copy of one of my Nikon shift lenses, A strange looking lens popped up on Ebay as an alternative. The Schneider Kreuznach PC Curtagon 4.0 35mm had an original take on a shift lens movement. Instead of the usual screw, you turn a ring to shift the lens.I resisted buying it for a while before GAS got the better of me, and this lens was just to curious to miss. It is also brand new in a box, and it cost me just €240. They usually go for much more. My local dealer has a sad looking one at €300 in Leica mount. So I was sure if I did not like it I will lose nothing when I sell it on.

My lens is the last version, and dates from the mid eighties and is multi coated. I only found a couple of reviews of this lens, and both talk about the lens having barrel distortion. I took it out to see what it was like to use, and did not see much of a problem.

I quite like the rendering of this lens, the images seem to have a certain smoothness. The chromatic aberrations seem less than my Nikon 35mm PC and the lens at F8-11 seems nice and sharp. I used Capture 1 to straighten things out to my satisfaction, although the barrel distortion is not really noticeable in a real life photo. My lens which has been years on the shelf has a certain stiffness to the shift mechanism, but it seems to be freeing up a bit. Will it dethrone the Nikon 35PC? Well the Nikon has 11mm of shift, the Curtagon has just 7mm, so it is a toss up.

BTW the guy who designed this lens ranked it as one of his best projects.

Some industrial lenses are essentially diffraction limited when used in their operating range.

Right. But where did the word "obvious" come from?

In the sense of "defects" that are easily seen.

I don't think the obviousness is an issue. Some of the lenses with the most desirable character have a artful blending of aberrations that is not obvious at all outside of laboratory conditions.

Define industrial here. Not sure if I have the right meaning in this case. You mean like C mount lens stuff?

I think that would probably fit lenses like a Nikon Printing-Nikkor, Apo El-Nikkor or a Schneider Kreuznach Macro-Varon or Makro-Symmar… mostly quite expensive and highly specialized lenses for a certain task or field of use. Some of those lenses are pretty much free of any visible distortion and abberations at the magnifications they were designed for, which makes them sought after for macro photography for the most part!

Most C-mount lenses won‘t fit those requirements (there might be a couple) even though it is s very common mount for industrial applications…

Lenses not made for general photography but for use in industrial settings like machine vision, product inspection, semiconductor manufacturing, motion picture negative printing, and the like. SK, Zeiss, and Nikon have all made such lenses.

www.nikon.com/business/industrial-lenses/

UV-105mm F4.5 needs all plastic layers on top of sensor removed to work in UV as it should ;)

Just buy a Zeiss Otus f/1.4 55 mm ...

www.zeiss.com/consumer-products/us/photography/otus/otus-1455.html

What?!?

One today can design a microphone with amazing "clarity." That is the specifications of pure tones are captured and can be reproduced at 80 dB fidelity using a sufficient digital recorder. However, that is not how we listen to music. The great blues guitar players would stretch their strings while playing so the tone would not be "pure" but sounded better. That of course has been picked up by such great artist as Clapton, Garcia, Betts. Great Jazz artist Miles Davis could play crystal clear precise or he could slur his notes - depending on his desires. What gives music "character" is the chamber we listen in is full of reflective surfaces that bounce the music to the listener from all directions. If done right that gives the much "body and depth." How we like to listen to music can be vastly different the just the pure tones on the sheet. People want to listen to music with character.

I think it's the same with photography. There are some limitations in optics that one doesn't find in signal processing. First a lens designed for photographic use - one with an aperture cannot image a point source to a point source - it will be a disk. The diameter of the disk will be inversely proportional to the diameter of the aperture. Fourier optics gives the details. A lens projects a cone in three dimensions onto a plane. One the focal plane is in focus. Most lens design today targets optimizing sharpness in the focal plane. That can lead to undesirable rendering to the out of focus areas in front and behind the focal plane. Such things are cats eye Bokeh, elliptical Bokeh vs round Bokeh. Some types of lenses that are important to optimizing the focal plane can produce poor rendering outside the focal plane particularly in the continuum of focus from in focus to completely out of focus. One example is aspherical lenses can produce nasty cat's eyes. Now if cats eyes don't bother someone they will crow about the sharpness of their lenses. But it is a trade off.

So I seems to me the parallel to "character" or "depth" or whatever you want to call it is in photography is what goes by rendering. That is how the lens renders the entire cone of light onto the sensor. A just like in music, that gets down to personal preference and the what the person finds aesthetically pleasing in their image.

I followed that link to the Zeiss site and cycled through the images from the Otis 1.4 28, 55, 85 and 100 over and over and over and over and . . .

A whole lot of credit has to be given to the photographers who contributed those images, and they probably could have done a superlative job with high-end lenses from other makers as well, but as a collection of images, for the purposes they were made, showcasing those lenses, they are simply sublime.

It don't get no better than that.

Rich

[deleted]

You must separate the means of recording the music, from the music the musicians are making. Even if the musicians are distorting the sound of their instruments, the best, most accurate microphone, is the better tool to record the music, otherwise you are adding distortion to distortion.

Reminds me of the idiotic vinyl LP revival, where distorted sound is prized over the CD who's sound is far more accurate and closer to what we would actually hear at a concert, or if we were in the recording studio.

Still the record companies are laughing all the way to the bank, with this brilliant marketing stunt. I see LPs cost almost double the price of the same music on a CD. I also read that 50% of LPs that are bought, are never played.

A musical consultant for one of Italy's most prestigious Opera houses, explained to me, the technical reasons why the sound carried on an LP is inferior. The warmth the LP fans rave on about is actually distortion. When I listen to music, I want to get as close as I can to the sounds the musicians actually made, especially for acoustic music.

Much the same could be said about the ludicrous film revival.

Of course a track carved in a vinyl record is not going to compare to specs of a 16 bit ACD. If a LP can produce 20 dB SNR I would be surprised. But I'm not sure that's the point. People don't listen to music in a sound proof recording studio. They listen to it in Jazz clubs in Georgetown. They listen to in in coffee houses. They listen to in large arenas. And more today they listen to it where the data are compressed and streamed. Even in peoples homes very few have acoustically pure listen environments. The CD came a the LP disappeared. For the most part the CD has been pretty much been eliminated as most music today is listened to compressed and streamed. Apple started the path to put the CD out of business when it introduced the iPod that was much more convenient than lugging around a portable CD player and could hold a lot more music than a CD.

Truthfully I was never a fan of the CD. While LP's were suspect at times and often didn't hold up well, CD came across to me as pretty sterile. I spent a lot of my misspent youth playing in dive bars, clubs, upscale bars, you name it and CD seemed to strip away a lot of the feel of the music. A CD probably is the proper medium for classical music, but for blues, jazz, folk, rock, country and western the CD never did much for me. In fact that today the biggest delivery of recorded music comes in a either MP3 or MPEG-4 compressed (lossy compression) format streamed or stored on people's phones seems to indicate that the CD was over kill for music.

As far as film. It is a different medium than digital, just as water color is a different medium than oils in painting. There are several reasons to shoot film - especially B&W film. First and foremost is the expansive dynamic range that can be realized on say 4x5 sheet film with the appropriate development. But it reality film is simply a different medium for which one can do photography. IMAX is still using 70 mm film. petapixel.com/2023/07/13/the-oppenheimer-70mm-film-reel-weighs-600-pounds-and-is-11-miles-long/ and it is for the quality.

I would include a lot of Jazz to in the type of music that is better on CD, as much of it is acoustic and like classical music, the details are important.

I am told the problem with CD sound lies with the mastering. I listen to music on fairly good equipment and some recordings are much better than others. ECM are usually at the top of the game with recordings on CD. Some of their earlier transfers to CD, did lose something in translation though.

Amplified music such as Rock and Pop are probably a different matter. When you listen to this sort of music live, the amplification and the speakers are probably not what is now called "High End HiFi". Probably distortion levels are quite high, so lower performing carriers are just fine. Just as certain pop music was once engineered to sound good on the FM radio, I am sure a lot of music is being engineered to sound good on streaming platforms.

I agree 4x5 or even 10x8 is still a very valid photographic medium. I do not miss 35mm or even 120 film. Digital is just so much more flexible and the quality is just so much better.

I am digitizing my old Jazz photography. I guess the golf ball sized grain gives these pictures period charm. How I would have loved to shoot these pictures at 1600 and have almost gainless results. I would have also got the chance to chose between B&W and colour after the shoot.

I don't know, it just seems that for an image of Thelonious Monk with a cigarette hanging out the right side of his mouth like in the W. Eugene Smith classic it would be hard to beat good old 35 mm TriX. www.artsy.net/artwork/w-eugene-smith-thelonious-monk-rehearsing-in-the-loft

I still use my 4x5 and shoot good old old TriX because of its latitude both in exposure and development. There is something to be said for a thick emulsion. It's easy enough to develop film without an extensive darkroom setup. Then it can be scanned. I've built three darkrooms in my house over the years. When we moved into our last house, my wive said - "no more darkrooms" - scan your film. I guess she got tired of giving up half her basement. There is a cottage industry that has developed for B&W film. B&W film has always been a medium of its own. In digital there is only one company that has been serious about B&W digital. That is Leica. Now I guess Pentax makes a monochrome camera. I picked up a Q2M about a year and a half ago and since then I only used my Fuji (XPro3) twice and both times on horseback as the extra space in the OVF on that camera is very handy almost essential when shooting off horseback. While there are some nice B&W conversion packages, Silver Efex Pro comes to mind, there is a loss to shoot on an interpolating color sensor and then converting back to B&W. I'll probably pick up a M11 monochrome this year to pair with my small collection of M glass. If Leica would come out with the Q3M with a 50 mm vs. 28 mm lens, I opt out for that over the M11 M. But that's an aside.

As an aside, a follow I worked with when I was at Fairchild Camera and Instrument - known as Fairchild Weston when I was there after they bought Weston Instruments and Sagamo recorders was a fellow named William Wright. He was the Chief Scientist for the Imaging division. When I came on the company organized all R&D, imaging, signal intelligence, electronic warfare and telemetry systems under one unit and somehow I ended up being the manager. Recorders had their own R&D. Since Fairchild Semiconductor built the first digital imaging sensor for military applications supported both airborne and space reconnaissance there was a great debate in the community of the advantages digital over film. Bill pretty much convinced me by showing me how much more information can be stored on 70 mm film which was the common format used in both airborne and space based cameras than on digital projected on the digital sensors at that time and 15 years out. This was in 1985.

So while we built digital systems for high resolution reconnaissance, we still poured a significant amount of R&D money (as did our customers) into film reconnaissance. NASA was one prime mover for multispectral and color cameras for the Landsat program. But high resolutions was not the prime driver for Landsat. About 2000 things started to change and the advances in digital CCD sensors and the advantages of digital - recovering film from space is tough - started to swing the balance toward film.

As far as listening to Jazz, I have some wonderful reel to reel tapes of most of my Jazz collection including, both Monk live and Miles Davis live at the Cellar Door in Georgetown. It is hard to beat a 15 inch per seconds for sound fidelity without producing the sterile of CD. If you wanted to burn tape, then record at 30 in/sec.