This 'Just the Lenses' article will take advantage of a Trioptics Imagemaster optical bench to compare lenses from different camera mounts with no camera involved. Why is that different? Because all other forms of testing (DxO, Imatest, or even photography) tests the camera-lens combination.
Editor's note: If you're unfamiliar with how to interpret MTF charts, you can find primers here and here.
I'll be honest. I'm pretty excited about the Canon 11-24mm f/4 L lens. I love shooting ultra-wide and the chance to shoot this wide with a rectilinear lens on a full-frame camera has me pretty excited. But I'm also very aware of how near-impossibly difficult designing a lens this wide would be, so my expectations were tempered a bit.
There's a reason I'll often stitch together a couple of 24mm shots for a landscape rather than take one 16mm shot. OK, there are several reasons, but image quality is high among them.
Every time you post a photo to Instagram, it loses a tiny bit of quality. It's not really noticeable for a single upload, but if you save and repost the photo over and over, the quality loss becomes extreme. It's a concept known as "generation loss," and is the subject of artist Pete Ashton's project "I Am Sitting In Stagram (2015)."
If you have a friend who just got into photography and they ask you to recommend a first lens to buy in addition to the standard kit lens, chances are very good you're going to tell them to go prime. Of course, their next question will inevitably be 'why?'
If you've been following PetaPixel for a little while, then you know that the idea of a web app that shrinks down the file size of your images without "noticeable" loss in quality is nothing new. JPEGmini has been doing it for years. So what is it that makes the new Compressor.io web app stand out?
When it comes to cameras, is bigger always better? Samsung didn't try to answer that question, but the company did shoot a funny video that shows pretty clearly that the general public seems to think the answer is "yes," even if there's no difference at all.
Walker Evans' famous photo book "American Photographs" was first published in 1938. Since then, the book has been released in new editions every 25 years or so. Although the photos contained within its covers have remained the same, the processes and technologies used to print the photos have evolved over time, causing each edition to be every so slightly different from the others.
A few weeks ago, we casually remarked that the best cameraphones today can probably snap better photos than top-of-the-line compact cameras from over a decade ago. Turns out that it's true.
Earlier today, Apple announced its new iPhone 5, which features a camera that's nearly identical to the one found in the 4S. Soon after the announcement, Apple put up the official product page for the phone, which includes a gallery of sample photographs shot using the iPhone 5. Unfortunately, none of the shots show low-light environments, which would have allowed us to gawk at the power of the camera's new and improved noise-killing processor. For now, we'll just have to settle for these generic shots showing what the 3264×2448 images look like when they pop out of the camera.
A user over on the Chinese forum Xitek has leaked the first sample photographs captured using the Sony A99, the company's upcoming flagship SLT (i.e. pellicle mirror) camera. The images are 100% crops of straight-out-of-camera JPEGs, with noise reduction completely turned off.
Nokia’s 808 PureView phone packs a hefty 41-megapixel sensor, but how do its …
UV lens filters are a popular way to protect the front element of …
Camera rating business DxOMark has published its in-depth sensor review for the Canon …
Turns out the 36.3 megapixel sensor inside the new Nikon D800 isn’t just …
Nokia has released a set of sample photographs in order to show off the camera quality of its new 41MP 808 PureView camera phone. The 33.3MB ZIP file contains just 3 untouched JPEG images -- the largest of which (seen above) is a 5368x7152, 38-megapixel photograph that weighs in at 10.3MB. The quality is quite impressive, given that the images were captured with a phone.
“Exposing to the right” is a well-known rule of thumb for maximizing image …
As you might know, different copies of the same lens can vary in quality, and some people go as …
DxOMark has just published its findings on the quality of Nikon’s new mirrorless …
The relatively small 1-inch CX-format sensor found in Nikon’s new mirrorless cameras caused quite a bit of …
While looking into the new compression service JPEGmini yesterday, the following statement caught my eye in an interview they did with Megapixel:
[...] sometimes you increase the quality setting in Photoshop and the actual quality of the image is reduced...
I had never heard of that before, so I decided to dig a little deeper.