Selecting a 90mm lens

[senderoaburrido]

I'm looking at 90mm lenses and there seem to be quite a few choices out there. Is there any major distinction between the offerings of Fuji, Nikon, Schneider, and Rodenstock? Sharpness is key for me, but sharpness is also something that seems to come from testimony and not on convenient, aggregated sheets of data like image circle information. How important is the shielding conferred by multiple coatings instead of just the one? I've been looking at a Super-Angulon 90mm f5.6 MC, but the dang thing is far too pricey (300 CDN) for my meager funds. I'm setting my budget around 150-200 CDN (so think 100-140 USD).

[IanG]

The coatings on the pre-MC Super Angulons is very good, I have 65mm f8, 75mm f5,6 & f8, 90mm f5.6 and 165mm f8 Super Angulons (all pre-MC) and they are all remarkably flare resistant. In practice I've had no problems shooting in conditions where the zoom lenses on my Canon flares badly.

If your shooting colour my experience is the very early Super Angulons in my case just my 65mm f8 SA exhibit a slight colour shift compared to the later SA's and MC lenses.

At one time I was almost obsessive that I had to use MC lenses but that was after bad experiences with poorly coated new 35mm camera lenses, now I'm more than happy to use coated lenses on my LF cameras.

Ian

[richardman]

The image quality of the modern big 4 is pretty much similar. The color response may be different. Personally I am a big fan of the Fujinon as they are practically underpriced comparing to the other 3.

[EdSawyer]

You should really double that budget to get into the "good" 90mms. The best is the 90mm f/8 from Nikon. Objective testing was done on many lenses, details here:

http://www.hevanet.com/cperez/testing.html

[Richard Wasserman]

What will you be photographing? If you don't need a lot of movements get a late-model plain 90mm Angulon (not Super) which will be within your budget, and go make photos. You can always get another lens later on if you need to and if you can afford it.

[senderoaburrido]

RichardMan: How does colour transmission differ? Is it just that each pulls different tones better than others? Or are some objectively worse across the board?

EdSawyer: How do I read these numbers? I assume the "cnt/mdl/edge" data is what is salient here.

Reading the review comments is quite astounding. LF lenses in some cases underperform the resolution of MF lenses! That's mad. And sort of depressing. I had thought the premise of LF photography was to squeeze more detail onto the negative.

[Bob Salomon]

You should really double that budget to get into the "good" 90mms. The best is the 90mm f/8 from Nikon. Objective testing was done on many lenses, details here:

http://www.hevanet.com/cperez/testing.html

This "test" leaves out so many lenses That it will not lead one to what are the "best" lenses. Nor does it use MTF or graph distortion or color curves. Lastly it isn't objective as it was done under uncontrolled conditions.

[senderoaburrido]

Bob: Are MTF curves provided on manufacturer data sheets a more reliable way to determine which lens I should look at?

[Bob Salomon]

Bob: Are MTF curves provided on manufacturer data sheets a more reliable way to determine which lens I should look at?

It is the only way to see what the lenses can do. That's why the lens manufacturers use them.

[IanG]

RichardMan: How does colour transmission differ? Is it just that each pulls different tones better than others? Or are some objectively worse across the board?

With early coated lenses the coatings themselves had a colour, early Zeiss Jena coated lenses were particularly blue and needed a warm up filter for colour work. I found my 65mm SA slightly warmer than my Grandagon & Sironar both MC.

There can be slight dfferences between different makes due to their coatings even with MC lenses.

Ian