Hello all, I'm just back from a trip to Southern Europe, where I shot with a variety of lenses I had not used before. Mainly light process lenses as I need(ed) to shed weight on my kit. Anyway, I brought a few nikkors. A 120 8 SW, 240 5.6 W (only shot from the trunk of the car because of weight) and a 300mm M.

I've got a few to go, but have developed and scanned the bulk of my work by now. Mainly 5x7 and 4x5. At first, I was not so surprised by a slight variation in sharpness, contrast and in particular saturation for the color slides. Than, when tagging and labeling my index files, I noticed something. Almost all shots with the SW and W lens were superb. The M lens shot were in a different (lower) league. Sharpness for all three is superb, but the 300 M produces much flatter images and the saturation in the color slides is notably lower. For B/W this is partly resolved by using a yellow filter, but again, the other lenses with the same filter render nicer images (I use the same Lee filters on all my lenses).

I've ruled out atmospheric conditions, DOF and other factors as the cause, based on a large series of images shot with either lens. Just out of curiosity, am I the only one experiencing this? Is it just my sample of the 300mm or is there another logical explanation? (I've compared slides shot with process lenses at 300mm+ on another occasion and they came out nicer than the nikkor M).

Thanks for chiming in.