From: "Joseph Chamberlain, DDS" Re: Canon digital bodies and Nikon lenses. : I don't think I can learn digital overnight and am not attempting to do it. : The issues I refer to on my original post relate to simple observations : accomplished by anyone (specialist or not) with the naked eye. I am keeping : an open mind and even thought that I might have bad lenses that needed to be : replaced. This is the reason I checked the reviews on photo forums to see : what other users had experienced with these lenses. I'm not going to be much help here, but I can tell you of my experiences. I am a canon user, with an armload of F1N's and a bigger armload of FD & FL Canon lenses. I also have a few non canon lenses, some of which under test outperform the canon equivalents. I chose not to move to the Canon AF gear, nor their digital - my AF cameras are pentax (for lens compatibility among other reasons) and the Digi is a Sony (for colour). I have while lecturing and working as a technician at college however, had quite a bit of experience handling other folks cameras and lenses.. Now there are some who will see no faults in their gear whatsoever and are more than happy with lenses and performance that would make me cringe. There are prideful people who feel that their choice reflects on them somehow and they too will not or cannot see faults. Some have cast longing eyes over equipment and once they've wrapped their paws around it found it less than their expectations and then there are those who have been downright happy - and for good reason :-) I recall one student, also a FD user who refused to move to the newer AF canons because she didn't like the lenses - she shot professionally with a guy who did use the newer lenses and she was never as pleased with the lens sharpness as she was with her own dusty old things. I also recall another student who is a nit-picker who went to the newer EF's, then after test shooting under flash conditions (for the sharpest possible shots) he concluded his lens was 'off'. He spent days shooting across focal ranges, apertures and focal lengths with 25 ASA and 50 ASA slide films before deciding the lens was simply not capable of giving him a sharp image - and I confess I had to agree with him - it was truly awful, so he bagged it up and sent it to canon who replaced the lens mount (charging his heavily saying he'd damaged it) and he reshot his tests again. Once more he found the results substandard. Canon again examined the lens, charged him for it and said there was nothing wrong. He borrowed another lens from a shop and reshot with that one on his body and on another borrowed body - all the shots were noticeably soft still. A number of other Canon shooting students compared images at high enlargements and most found their shots were similar, and students borrowing ancient beat up K1000's with really grubby Tamron manual lenses were easily getting sharper shots than any of the canon zooms tried. I didn't have a collimator to test the various lenses with at the time so I couldn't say what the heck was so wrong with them, but they WERE clearly substandard. I hate to say this about my beloved Canon - by they were not something I'd have spent money on! I'm not talking about a little bit of softness either, there was in most of these shots absolutely nothing across the whole frame which could be called sharp. Shots of jewellery produced no sharp edges anywhere, clasps blurred into stones, cloth sample shots were just a fuzz of colour. not good. I have lenses with fungus that produced better images that some of those lenses! End of the day, maybe all these poor buggers had landed duds and canon were just being pigs about admitting it.. I don't know, but I DO understand the frustration of it all. lens is clean and new, costs lots, looks good but the images are bleah. I'd be frustrated. k
