Short lens tests by Hawk

In my experience test charts are a lot less useful and seriously uninformative unless very much more care is taken with them than most people can manage (See SLRgear blogs for confirmation of this), not least because at the short distances needed for non-tele lenses lenses tend to behave differently than they do near infinity where most images are taken.

After doing a lot of tests over many years, I have decided that by far the most useful tests are images of building(s) at least 50m away and large enough to cover most of the visual field even with wide-angle lenses. My favourite building has chrome handrails too which make CA obvious, and it is so easy to take a few lenses down to it and shoot them at every major FL and aperture down to f11. The results are not only very easy to see and compare but much easier to relate to real conditions in views.

If you are interested in sharpness near MFD you have to test for this separately (with charts if you like, so long as you vary the focus manually to allow for curvature of field), and many cheap modern zoom lenses perform much better than you'd think (and many older ones a lot worse!). The most stringent and simple test of macro sharpness I've come across is close-ups of a dandelion in its puffball seed state. Some of your favourite old tele lenses will be so bad they will make you weep!

Edited by Miranda F - 22 February 2019 at 11:22

While I agree with most of what you wrote I don't have good building for lens tests anywhere near me. I have nice brick wall in front of my house, but personally I find results with test chart more informative for my current needs. I do have lots of samples from all of my lenses but I find it too hard to decide just based on these samples. Test chart fills a gap for me and makes decision easier.

I'll be moving up with focal length so next lenses will be 24s - Sigma, Tokina, Panagor. I'll also test Samyang FE for comparison. When I'll finish or maybe earlier I'll try to add some scripts to easily compare test charts side by side for various lenses.

Tokina 24mm test is now online.

With a small delay... Samyang AF 24mm test is online. Next one is 24-70mm F4 zoom at 24mm and then three 28mm lenses + 28-70mm zoom at 28mm.

Minolta MD 28mm F2.8 test added.

Just added short test of real gem - Vivitar VMC Series 1 28mm F1.9.