Sunday, November 04, 2007

Patriots 4EVA. Now that they went ahead and beat the Colts, let's just let them have their way to an undefeated season. Who gives a shit at this point? At least we can say we were there to witness such an event.

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From the minds of Minolta. It's pretty common knowledge that Prime Lenses will generally give you better sharpness, color fidelity and contrast than their zoom counterparts, in addition to larger apertures and smaller sizes (sometimes). There are a few zoom lenses made by the major manufacturers that come 'close' to prime lenses (Canon L Lenses, Nikon IF-ED, Minolta G, Sony Zeiss, Pentax ED, etc.). Are these top of the lenses worth it?

Having owned 4 different Canon EF L Series Lenses, I would have to say that they are. Just about every modern zoom lens made will have adequate to good sharpness and will come equipped with some modicum of anti-glare coatings in the lens objectives to help with contrast and color. What they are lacking of course, is the professional build quality, superior contrast/color fidelity and generally good sharpness throughout the zoom range. The real kicker is that they are generally 'faster' (in aperture) and will retain that aperture throughout the focal length range.

Of course, when you don't want to step up to these lenses, there's always the good consumer range of prime lenses, which are cheaper and can give you just about the same amount (or more) performance than the high-end zooms. Which brings us to two lenses in the Minolta AF Mount (which retains compatibility with the Sony Alpha A-100 DSLR), the 50mm f/1.7 and 28mm f/2.8.

Some Shots:

Minolta 50mm f/1.7 AF:


The bokeh (background blur) on this lenses is pretty good. This shot was taking wide open, but at 100%, isn't entirely sharp. In-body IS (Sony calls it Super-Steady-Shot) was used, even though the shutter speed was set to 1/125.






Compared to the Canon EF 50mm f/1.8:






Just a FYI: The Canon 50mm shots were taken back in 2004 with the 6.1 Megapixel Canon 10D, while the Sony shots above with the Minolta were take just a few days ago (at 10 Megapixels). The difference in quality between a 6 megapixel and 10 megapixel image is pretty much non-existant. I can uprezz the 6MP image to 10MP and not notice any major degradation of quality. The same can be said about 720p vs 1080p in the HDTV realm.
posted by HZA | 10:22 PM | email | archive