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View Full Version : 72mm SAXL vs. 75mm Grandagon-N



Emre Yildirim
18-Jan-2006, 13:10
Yep it's back to the old Schneider vs. Rodenstock debate.

I'm just curious though - I've used the 72mm and find it to be a very good lens. However, I keep hearing rumors that the Grandagon is actually sharper. If this is true, I'd be willing to trade this lens, since I don't really like the weight/size and rarely use movements.

Which lens is sharper? Aside from weight/size and if money was not a problem, which lens would you go for?

Leonard Evens
18-Jan-2006, 14:10
I have the 75 mm 4.5 Grandagon-N. In retrospect, I think I would have been better off with the 72 mm SAXL, at least for my purposes. The main reason is that the image circle for the Grandagon is only 195 mm. That is enough if you don't contemplate anything but minor movements, but otherwise it can be a problem. Often when using my lens, particularly in architectural photography, I find I have a large empty foreground, and I can't rise enough to reduce it to reasonable proportions. And, of course, without sufficient rise, you can't get the top of a tall building in the frame, which tends to diminish the use of using a wide angle lens in the first place.

The Grandagon has a very bright image, and with my Maxwell screen, I don't have much trouble focusing, even in dim light. However, I do find that I have to be very careful that the standards are parallel. That seems to be a problem with any lens of similar focal length. A very slight tilt or swing, which would be tolerable with a longer lens, can lead to important parts of the scene falling outside the DOF region because of the tilt.

The image is certainly sharp, but again any extreme wide angle lens is not going to give the appearence of fine detail that a longer lens will give just because in a typical scene everything is so much smaller.