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Comments
Go to the Coma section at the bottom of this page:
https://photographylife.com/reviews/nikon-z-20mm-f1-8-s/2
And here is even better news – if you want to get these highlights looking like real dots (yes, it is possible!), slightly de-focus the center frame and focus closer to the edges. The lens is super sharp in the center anyway, so a very slight shift of focus towards the edges should not hurt anything. When I focused on the edges of the frame, the above shapes were all gone, rendering spots that looked quite round.
So how would you do this in the field while shooting at night? Put a pretty bright star at the edge of the frame, focus on it, then turn off autofocus. Take a picture, and if it looks good both in the corners and the center, you are all set. If the center looks too blurry, you went a bit too far – move the star a bit away from the edges towards the center and try again. I tried this out at night and it really works!
I was thinking of trying the fastest tilt-shift lens I could get which whould be kind of like shooting an FX lens on a DX because of its large image circle. Shame they aren't terribly fast but I could always track I suppose.
The best people at astro who aren't tracking tend to shoot batches of five to noise average and shoot multi-row pano's. The 35mm Art on a 7D2 is a favourite.
His comments are usually glowing initially until he finds a flaw or two.
Mr. Chambers is biased in favor of the best lenses (aren't we all) and holds manufacturers to the highest standards not just regarding IQ in manufacturing but maintaining competitive edge from haptics, to software etc.
Though he ostensibly favors Zeiss optics and is somewhat uniquely and harshly critical of Leica, he can be swayed by the best and the brightest new products (i.e. Canon's most recent R lenses = 50MM f1.2 etc). Having kept track of his opinions going back to the D3x years, and looking at his own sample images, its interesting that I prefer mostly his Leica-made images much more than others.
At the moment I am using a 14mm IRIX and cropping the edges which I can do with the D850 but the D850 is poor for noise in comparison to the D750/80.
The meteor shower was somewhat of a bust, and while corners were decent with not much coma, the trails from jets were quite annoying.
Diglloyd talks of "planar" or flat field lenses for this kind of work and frankly wide angles seem invariably to have some curvature of field and/or coma deterioration at wider apertures - nature of the beast.
Regarding Zeiss, you have to like the Zeiss "look" or rendering (which I generally don't). The 25MM Milvus produces very detailed images, but has a warmish color bias which I find visually unappealing - the 85 Otus as well, and while the 55 Otus seems quite good, if I were to choose one, I would take the 28 Otus as it's rendering it closer color wise to my own expectations. Too expensive and heavy but I wouldn't turn down a good deal on a used one.
If you look at MTFs for most wide angles, the edge contrast is frequently much lower than center due to astigmatism, curvature of field, coma and limitations in resolution.
One lens that I have (though never used for Astro) is the 24mm F1.8. Nikon's MTF implies edge being very good wide open. Maybe not wide enough for this kind of work, but you might want to experiment.
Again one might be judicious in accepting his as the final word, but it does trouble me when you take a presumed state of the art camera and it does not conduct itself to produce acceptable results in all conditions. Since he is using ISO 64 perhaps it is a noise issue - not sure.
Perhaps others have a different experience with the Z7.
I must say that when I tested the Z7 I found the image quality sufficiently different from the D850 to avoid it first round. The D850 seems oversaturated and the Z7 seems to have perhaps less saturation but also less DR. This is too subjective and I have nothing quantitative to back it up.
The D780 sample images seems very good to me, so looking for a D850 replacement with less saturation, akin to the D780 but at higher MP.
Last, and this perhaps should have a separate blog, but does anyone feel restricted with the limited autofocus points on the D780? The Z7 has the most and for wildlife photography and portraits, I would assume the more the better. Any comments?
https://photonstophotos.net/Charts/PDR.htm#Nikon%20D850,Nikon%20Z%207
Not enough of a difference to discern...
Regarding saturation (I'm assuming you're referring to color saturation), if you're looking at the camera JPEGs just make sure they were both produced with the Neutral Picture Control, and even then, you're just comparing both cameras' post-processing.
Shooting raw, I default to SD profile and adjust saturation in post before output to jpegs/tifs. The Imaging-Resource website occasionally provides color accuracy and saturation measures for specific cameras (Nikon D800, D850 etc). This is very helpful to me as I consider adjustments. I have read that the Z7 and D850 default SD color profile outputs are different, both Ming Thein and Diglloyd have discussed this. By how much is unclear.
Color accuracy is important for prints.
I've found that there's one realization a person needs to get over to start really comprehending how to manage color: color is not a physical phenomenon, it's something made-up in our heads. Light is the physical phenomenon, and a single measurement of light doesn't in itself mean "green", or somesuch. Our brains take one or more such measurements and conclude "green". Understanding this distinction is important to being able to wrangle all the gonkulators we put in our imaging mechanisms to manage "color".
I'm working right now on a way to measure a camera's spectral response in order to build more robust camera profiles. I've got all the piece-parts, just need to assemble the box and take some reference measurements. I don't have either a Z7 or D850, but I might try to find an article of each to measure, as Nikon DSLR spectral measurements I've seen to date have been remarkably consistent. A change in the Z line would be interesting to consider...
See comments below from diglloyd regarding software modifications by Nikon and his perceptions of impact. Maybe what I am seeing with the Z7 is the tradeoff of loss of microcontrast in exchange for aberration adjustments? Perhaps it's the loss of perceptual "pop" that I am seeing in the D850 vs Z7?
"The Nikon Z7 requires distortion correction (and chromatic aberration correction) for the Nikon NIKKOR Z 24mm f/1.8 S by setting a flag in the EXIF. This requirement guarantees sub-optimal micro contrast and sharpness in a substantial portion of the outer zones of the frame due to the stretching-apart of pixels, although central areas remain at least as good.
Distortion correction makes a mockery of the claimed MTF performance which becomes false advertising at best. This is rather shameful, but Nikon is not alone in making such claims, both the fantasy MTF aspect of computed (not measured) MTF, and the distortion correction which degrades the captured performance which is always inferior to the claimed performance in a real lens mounted on a real camera. And... most users won’t care."
gg, I recognize that our perception can impact what we accept as "natural" or not. It is when we make comparisons such as with various choices of color gamut when we see differences. Take a Nikon vs Canon/Leica for skin tones. When compared, the latter seems more neutral while Nikon is "warm". Isolate Nikon image by itself, one may not deem it warm vs reality.
I look forward to your updates on measuring colors via camera sensors with the objective I guess to write software and sell it as a modification of the defaults of a manufacturer. Very interesting project.
Flip.
A few years ago, I shot some images in a theater. For a choral performance, they put up blue accents on the walls with LED spots. Got home and pp-ed the images, and the blue was horribly truncated. Long story short, there are ways to make camera profiles that better-handle such things, but it's arcane and complicated tech. If you use Adobe products, you already have the fruits of such tech at your disposal in the DCP profiles. Essentially, matrix vs lookup table color conversion...
I've written a couple of threads at pixls.us about what I'm doing, including the theater images, borked and corrected. Here's a link to the third post, which has links to the first and second:
https://discuss.pixls.us/t/the-quest-for-good-color-3-how-close-can-it8-come-to-ssf/18689
"The Nikon NIKKOR Z 24mm f/1.8 S always delivers a pleasing image, with Nikon’s design goal seemingly about visual impact more than absolute performance (it would not be unreasonable to liken Nikon’s design gestalt to be Leica-like—visual impact first, sharpness not the high priority)."
"Does an f/1.8 prime lens beat out a compact f/4 zoom? Trounce." (i.e. 20MM f1.8s Vs 14-30S Zoom)
"Each time I swapped the zoom with any other prime, the center of the image shifted by a RIDICULOUS amount (28 pixels horizontally, 54 pixels vertically at 20mm)—a damning testament to quality control showing that the optical axis of the lens is not reliably found at the center of the frame. This is quite common across brands, not unique to Nikon." (Re; 14-30S).
Flip.
I suspected such when I inadvertently used a D7000 camera profile on a Z6 image one day, looked just fine. I'd surmise Nikon goes through pains to acquire sensors with very specifically and consistently formulated Bayer dyes...
As for camera/lens reviews (or any subject matter), YouTube is a blessing and a curse. Since anyone with an internet connection can post anything, it's hard to wade through all the amateur garbage that should never have been uploaded. Does anyone really watch or enjoy unboxing videos? I have never watched (or read) the infamous KR, mostly because of what other photographers have said, so I can't comment on his reviews. I find Dustin Abbott to be quite good: detailed, honest, clean and polite (something Jared Polin could learn from), and not a fanboy but also not unreasonably nitpicky. Matt Granger can be good, though a wider variety of subjects would make his reviews more applicable (since he apparently only knows how to shoot attractive young women). Chris Nichols (The Camera Store) is also quite good. He has the qualities I mentioned for Dustin Abbott, but his videos are all in the field (which I like) whereas Dustin spends most of his time in a studio (though the sample photos are taken in the field). Another famous married couple (whom I will not name) I watched one video and that was enough to turn me off for life. Maybe it was a fluke but as the saying goes, you only get one chance to make a first impression. The artist formerly with DigitalRev (whom I will not name) would be good if he could avoid all the sexual innuendos (putting a telephoto lens in your crouch, really, I mean grow up).
Regarding reviews, I don't generally prefer videos, but testing including lens resolution numbers (central, peripheral and average) for cameras DR, color accuracy, and degree of oversaturation, all in numbers so I can compare systems/lenses to others (assuming the same sensor MPs). PC Photo, Camera-Resource, Ephotozine, and in the past, Photozone have all filled that gap somewhat, with comments from Ming Thein and Diglloyd as enhancers, the latter 2 particularly as to system reliability (long term view) and limitations for their respective styles. Diglloyd and lens rental are some of the few that evaluate lenses in more detail, including aberations and skew which is important in choosing.
For video, Hugh Brownstone is stylistically acceptable to me and his bias towards Leica and to some extent Hasselblad can be insightful. We have age in common which may be why I tolerate so many "hold that thought" interludes without getting annoyed. He rarely comes back to the "lost thought" but age has its privileges (or at least it did in the past).
This data can be piped into a program called dcamprof, which produces either a DCP or ICC profile. Camera profiles made with this data work better than the simple matrix profiles at crunching down extreme colors. I got into this after shooting one of the grandkid's choral performances; the auditorium had deployed some blue LED accent lights around the perimeter that just "cartooned" to a single shade with the default matrix profile. Using spectral data, one can make a LUT profile instead of the 3x3 matrix, which translates the more saturated colors to more gradations in sRGB or any other small colorspace.
Go to this thread at pixls.us, scroll down a bit and you'll find the matrix and LUT renditions of the auditorium image: https://discuss.pixls.us/t/the-quest-for-good-color-1-spectral-sensitivity-functions-ssfs-and-camera-profiles/18002
Just about every such plot I've seen of a Nikon camera's spectral sensitivity has this general shape. In fact, I tried this last night, I developed one of my Z6 images with the D7000 profile and it came out just fine...
https://hdm-stuttgart.de/open-film-tools/english/publications/OFT-CameraCharacterization.pdf
Scroll down to slide 71.
https://kenrockwell.com/fuji/x-mount-lenses/50mm-f1.htm
He says:
Fastest autofocus lens sold new today; lets us shoot in light twice as dim as with an f/1.4 lens, eight times as dim as with an f/2.8 lens and sixteen times as dim as with an f/4 lens, with the same shutter speed and ISO.
Fujinon now joins the exclusive 50mm f/1 club, which for over 30 years had only one member: Canon, with their amazing EF 50mm f/1.0L.
There are other 50mm and 58mm f/0.95 lenses (Canon in 1962, LEICA in 2008 and Nikon in 2019), but those are primitive manual-focus only lenses. The Canon 50/1 and Fuji 50/1 are the only f/1.0 autofocus lenses ever made.
Again, he is comparing apples to oranges without regard to equivalence. But he is not totally deceptive (or clueless) as his headline notes that a 50mm focal length in APS-C is equivalent to 75mm in full frame.
If he was honest, he would point out that a 1.0 lens in APS-C is equivalent to a 1.4 lens in full frame. So while I am sure it is a decent lens, Fuji is 30-40 years behind Nikon and Canon in this regard and is certainly not matching Canon's and Nikon's upcoming 1.2 lenses.
This 50mm f/1 is for people who thrive on low light. I've owned the Canon EF 50mm f/1.0L for years, and while not as sharp at f/1 as other lenses at their slower maximum apertures, so what: there was no other way to get f/1 which can make the difference between getting the shot — or not.
I respond:
Sure, there are lots of ways. Just buy a 1.4 from Canon, Nikon or Sony.