Any Real Reason To Favor One Particular Lens Line?

[pgk]

FWIW I once owned a Takumar lens with a small but very obvious scratch on the front element. After a time i used a black felt tip pens to fill the scratch in - more obvious but it proved to be effective in reducing flare. I am pretty sure that the result of this filled scratch was so minimal that I would have been very hard pushed to have distinuished between photographs taken with this or a similar unscratched lens. Of course this does depend somewhat on lens, ype of lens, subject matter and very importantly any extraneous light, effectiveness of hood used, etc.. But in general, and especially after using some very early lenses with siginificant issues, I would say that poor lens condition is generally rather more forgiving that we often suppose.

Living by the sea and often photographing from boats, I see filters as protection and accept that they need periodic replacement. The filters are rarely immaculate. Resulting images show no discernable degredation much of the time.

[rdenney]

No brand loyalty for me. But later generations do outperform earlier generations, at least for brands like Schneider who have been around forever.

Lenses turned a corner with multicoating, but my old 121/8 Super Angulon, despite not being multicoated, is still a favorite. That probably has little to do with performance.

These days, I’d by later stuff just to get a shutter that might work.

Rick “on the agenda: putting the watchmaker tools to work on shutters” Denney

[Greg]

I am not loyal to any one manufacturer. I've used both Leitz and a Voigtlander optics that were dogs. My 508mm Caltar on 11x14 on the other hand has never disappointed me once after all these years.
In the 1990s I had and used professionally a 24-120mm AF Nikkor that was supposed to be one of Nikon's worst optic. My sample was super sharp, and over the years was able to compare it to newer models of the 24-120mm... my early sample outperformed all of them by a mile.

[Sal Santamaura]

You must have missed posts 41 and 47.

[Drew Wiley]

pgk - I live near the sea too, and a salt spray affected lens or filter does lead to a degraded image. I pity those pro bird videographers who sit around some beach cliff with $40,000 worth of gear for two weeks on end, and have to clean their lens every ten minutes, hoping to get 10 of 15 seconds of footage of some rare event.

[pgk]

pgk - I live near the sea too, and a salt spray affected lens or filter does lead to a degraded image. I pity those pro bird videographers who sit around some beach cliff with $40,000 worth of gear for two weeks on end, and have to clean their lens every ten minutes, hoping to get 10 of 15 seconds of footage of some rare event.

Many years ago I was offered a long Nikkor lens (400) by a sports photographer working for a national newspaper in London. I was obviously used and unfortunately had some fungus as a result of being all too often used in wet conditions and not dried out enough. I declined but he didn't seem too bothered about the effect of even fungus. I suppose it goes with the territory.

Back to the thread title. Leica have designed and built their own lenses but have also use Schneider, Minolta and Sigma designs too. One major reason for sticking with a manufacturer is consistency but clearly this may not be appropriate if differing designs are used. Also over time design parameters chage too so a mix of conventional and aspherical lenses would give slightly differing results. Perhaps a set of lenses from a particular era and all from the same maker might be more coherent. But in stills photography is coherence a desired aim I wonder?

With modern AF cameras I tend to stick with the makers own lenses to maximise compatibility. With MF cameras I have a real mix.

[Scott Davis]

Being a fan of vintage optics, I'm not at all concerned about brand consistency from lens to lens. If you had to nail my feet to the floor about a single brand, I'd probably go with Kodak - the Wide Field Ektars, Commercial Ektars, and the Portrait lenses are really really hard to beat, regardless of what you have to pay for them. And I've gotten VERY lucky with buying mine when I have - all of them have been bought on the cheap, either through being in the right place at the right time, or (in the case of my 405mm Portrait lens) knowing that the weirdness going on in the cement between the elements will have zero effect on the images (it's a soft focus lens! And it gets used in the studio and never will have light directly shining into it...).

[Gabe]

I own and use lenses from all of the big four. In terms of performance I see no significant differences between them. Rather they were all bought for a specific other inherent feature (size, weight, coverage and so on) vs other alternatives. Diffraction is typically more of a limiting factor in terms of resolution than the specific lens design anyway.

[jnantz]

Rick “on the agenda: putting the watchmaker tools to work on shutters” Denney

exactly ! and your milk homogenizer I mean ultrasonic cleaner..

[PRJ]

Personally I think of lenses with respect to coatings. There is an obvious spectrum from uncoated to multicoated. Similar coatings give similar results regardless of the manufacturer. Later multicoated lenses are pretty much all the same, though I generally prefer Fuji for no reason whatsoever.