Hi folks, just wanted to check in with a followup to some previous threads. You might recall that I asked for your thoughts on the best-quality lenses for 8x10, and there was alot of back-and-forth about various new and old lenses. I finally opted for the Rodenstock Sironar-S (despite their outrageous cost), in 360mm and 240mm focal lengths. I'm just back from a week of shooting with them, and I have to say that the results blow me away. The image circles are big enough for huge amounts of movements with no visible edge fuzziness even wide open (a problem I frequently have with my Nikkor 450M despite its supposedly huge image circle), and all thirty of my film originals came out looking impossibly crisp and sharp. I didn't do any direct side-by-side comparisions with my other lenses, but I can definitely say that there is a noticable difference between the results with these lenses and all the other lenses I have used. These are visibly the sharpest 8x10 film originals I have ever seen; I'm even concerned that my usual scan resolution of 2000 dpi isn't going to capture everything that these lenses can record. It's exciting to see film originals of this quality-- they will be really fun to print in large size.

So, thanks for your various suggestions, and for those looking for the end-all killer optics, this sure is the solution for me.

Best regards,

~cj

www.chrisjordan.com