Peter Karbe talk about lenses.

[caissa]

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On 7/15/2020 at 7:26 AM, Photoworks said:

Leica has publish a great video how their lenses are made.

 

As usual Mr. Karbe has a lot of interesting details to tell. So the contents are new and in this sense a great video. But technically speaking the video is terrible, it contains a lot of garbage that could have easily been removed (see beginning). And Mr. Karbe looks slightly exhausted/sick, really like looking back to a long career, but not looking forward to a bright future. So I feel somehow slightly depressed after this video.

Maybe another thing that bugs me. Some people think that Karbe likes the SL35 “best”. But in reality he just told that with the uniform size of the prime lenses they had “a lot of space” for additional corrections in the 35mm lens. (In another interview.) And so he thinks this SL35 is probably the best corrected of all the lenses (which also the MTF graphs confirm). The best corrected is not necessarily also the best loved or most useful lens. A wide lens would be more useful and “typical” for many users (28, 24, maybe even 21 for some users).

And yes for me that means that the 35mm is unfortunately overly big (also the 50mm). And for photographic practice a smaller, maybe slightly less corrected lens would have been the better lens.  (See Sigma 45mm, or the Q2 lens).

But of course thanks for the link and for publishing the video.

Edited August 2, 2020 by caissa

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[emlandre]

On 7/19/2020 at 11:39 AM, Steve Ash said:

I really enjoyed the presentation which provides competent answers to frequently raised questions. 

My take away from this great presentation: 
1) There is still improvement potential for the already awesome M-lenses. 
2) Older M-Lenses have a resolving power of 24Mp. Thus a 24Mp sensor is in balance with old lenses.

3) Newer M lenses are capable of more and need higher resolution sensors to get the system in balance. Or in other words, before investing in better lenses from Leica’s pov, it is wise to improve on the weakest part, i.e the sensor. 

4) Due to this I now would be keen to know what the actual resolving capacity of each of my lenses is.
5) As long as both lenses and sensors have room for improvement the "balance approach" presented by Karbe makes very much sense and is currently followed by Leica as seen with the M10-R.
6) Karbe left one scenario out of discussion: What happens if one of both is at its technological end? In my pov then the balance approach is at its ends and a higher resolving power of the other will still improve the image quality. 

Another consequence would be that for a given set of lenses higher resolution sensors will improve the image quality or the capability to enlarge the image without artifacts.

Good observations. The balance point is where you have an affordable feasible product. If the 50mm lense weights 2KG is 50CM long with a front end diameter of 20CM and cost $10000000 to support a 100MP sensor the game is lost.