Originally Posted by cj001f
Perhaps you could learn how to read an MTF chart from me? Bottom axis is image height in mm, left axis is Image Preservation/Modulation Contrast/ whatever you want to call it. You can compare the same crop factor by simply stopping at the 13mm image height on the chart for the 16-35mm lens.
MTF charts are one tool for a designer. Imaging systems costing millions of dollars are designed and specified with MTFs that are produced using the very same design software used by Canon, etc. Are they perfect? No. Are they relied upon, hell yes. Now the publicly available MTF's probably aren't always reliable, but that's a different story.
Sure, coatings, baffles, etc. matter but until someone actually produces public data on those are less reliable than MTFs to me. Everyone's eye is different, and humans are often influenced by packaging.
The aperture stop always limits the light path through a system, by definition. It's generally chosen to allow the fastest possible F# that gives an "acceptable" quality image with the specified components. What "acceptable" is will very lens to lens, company to company. Are modern pro lens generally better designs? Yes. Inherently? No. Will an EF lens take an image that's very similar to an L lens at F20something? Yes, all of the image aberrations increase the further away from the optical axis a ray of light travels. Stop down the lens and they decrease substantially.
And what would I learn from you? Spelling? :p
Perhaps the needs/wants of professional sports photographers? That would be interesting.
In turn you might learn that there are plenty of people who don't need/want what you do, or they just lack the budget, and they've been able to acheive good results with equipment that isn't as good. That was the purpose of my original post (I'll bold) You can take good pictures with cropped sensors. There are decent lenses available for them. Many users, even some professionals, are happy with them We can have arguments over what makes a lens decent for unspecified uses, I can show you data, you can disagree from your experience, whatever. They still meet the needs of millions of photographers, and are better than similar things that were sold a decade ago in many ways.
Summit-
You can have the trophy. I'm not an expert, those are all old, grey, and as a species fast on the track to extinction All it takes now is a bit of knowledge and a computer to design a decent lens now (not a great lens, but a good design). I don't know everything, and listening to people drone on all day at seminars doesn't help my knowledge deficit or the ability to post coherently in the evening.
And I agree with you on Canon's marketing theory or pro/consumer, which is why the 1.3x sensor is going to definitely be a stopgap. There is another good camera company out there, Nikon, that makes some decent cameras and has decided on only 1 reduced sensor size, 1.5x, and makes some nice, reasonably well built lenses for them. In the longer term there is also the 4/3 format consortium, if Fry's keeps selling the Olympus kits cheap, and other do as well that may go somewhere at the consumer level.
Since I own a D70 body, I'll probably get a couple more DX lenses for it. They take pictures good enough for me, last well, and I enjoy them, which is all that matters in the end.