I'm posting this in the interest of sharing. No need for flaming or negative commentary. Please don't consider this a scientific test or conclusive in any way. I do plan to do another round of testing on this pair... The results very well may be due to sample variance...
With that said, here are the details. Having recently built out a 4x5 kit over the last year, I've read all the usual lens reviews and many forum posts to evaluate lenses for my bag. As many of you know, there are a few sites with well documented lens tests, but other than that, there's a lot of commentary and anecdotal evidence on this and other forums. In my research, I've read the phrase, "you probably won't notice the difference between it and something way more expensive" more than a few times. So much so, that I'd figured it was it basically true. Based on reading this phrase so many times, I wanted to really see for myself if the Fujinon NW 150mm, I picked up on the cheap in fact provided 90% of the performance of the de facto champion, the Rodenstock Sironar-S.
So, with that, I set up my tripod, a Manfrotto 410, Sinar F2 and positioned the combo about 10 feet from the front of the brick oven I built some years back. I leveled the camera and and squared it against the wall as best as possible and set to focusing the Fuji lens. Once I exposed a sheet of HP5+ (it's all I had around today) with the Fuji, I inserted and refocused the Sironar-S and exposed another sheet of film. Both of these were shot at f22 for 21.1 seconds on HP5+ with the Sinar F2 and tripod locked in position. No movement was made between exposures other than double checking focusing on each lens mounting. NO photoshop work (e.g., levels, toning, sharpening, or anything else) has been applied to these images. Other than the jpg conversion and the snipping these 100% crops from the original image, nothing has been done to these images. Have a look the results by clicking on each thumbnail below...
Center - Oven Arch:
Center Lower Left - Oven Landing Crap:
Honestly, I'm pretty surprised.. So much so that I have myself wondering if I goofed up the Fujinon shot. But, thinking back, I focused down pretty carefully and set the aperture at f22 for each of them. Either way, I do intend to retest the pair with a target a little further off in the distance. If that turns up anything obviously different than what I've found here, I'll retest this scenario again.
I'll post more pics in the next post, but if you're interested in reading up more or seeing higher resolution images, you can check out my write up here: http://wp.me/p2PvoS-3h
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