Normal Lens Tests

These are a series of test shots to compare the characteristics of a number of normal lenses that I own. I've tried to standardize the procedure as much as possible, but flaws are obviously still present. The procedure was to take a manual metering of a scene, set up a camera (Canon 20D) on a tripod and focus on the same spot using the same point of view and the same settings of ISO 100, 1/1600th a second and f2.8 (except for the Industar-50 which is wide open at f3.5). Then, the images were loaded in Photoshop CS2 and auto levels and auto contrast applied. The reason I chose to apply these automatic "adjustments" to the images was because the different lenses all gave slightly differing exposures at the same settings and these adjustments seemed to best even out the differences while still preserving the lens characteristics. 100% pixel views of the center of each image was saved after these adjustments were performed using no sharpening. The full image was then rescaled and given a moderate amount of sharpening (50%, .7, 0). Images were captured in camera at highest JPEG setting in adobeRGB color space. Web images were saved with a "medium" setting in CS2's "save for web" utility.

Leica Summicron-R 50mm 3-Cam:

Canon 50mm Compact-Macro:

Canon TS-E 45:

Canon 50/1.4:

Canon 24-70L @ 50mm:

Helios-44:

Zenitar M2s:

Industar-50 (at f3.5):

Ok, now for the more problematic images; 100% crops: