On Jun 24, 2006, at 11:51 PM, Paul Stenquist wrote: > Handheld tests are meaningless no matter if they're "real > life" or not.
I beg to differ -- they allow one to know whether or not a lens is suitable for one's style of shooting, if one's style happens to be hand-holding. They are useless as "resolution tests", but I don't think anyone was suggesting that a resolution test should be shot hand-held. Personally, I suggest that resolution tests be shot on tripods by people who work for magazines that I don't buy. I figured out something today -- I have a 21mm lens that's an oldie and a cheapie. I have a hell of a time getting anything sharp out of it at any aperture, except when I am totally still or on a tripod or monopod. It's significantly poorer, hand-held at the same shutter speeds, than my 50mm, which makes no sense at all. Today I shook the camera and felt a funny vibration. Changed lenses, no vibration. Went back to the 21mm, vibration. There's something spring-like that's vaguely loose inside of it that appears to magnify slight vibrations, making it nearly impossible to hand-hold. It means that the lens is probably broken in some way. But if I only tested it on a tripod, it would perform very well. By the way -- tripod tests are where the totally false "You can't hand-hold a Pentax 67" rumors came from. Tests were done on an underweight tripod that revealed a whole lotta vibration. The author then extrapolated that if the camera was no good on a tripod, well, it MUST be worse hand-held! Of course, since he drew his initial conclusion wrongly (he simply proved that his tripod was no damned good), his extrapolation was also wrong. Of course, I can post those high-res scans of hand-held Pentax 67 negs all I want, but no one will believe little old me, the guy who, you know, ACTUALLY TRIED IT. -Aaron -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
