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Re: Minolta experience...

12.74.2.133

Well Romeister, this is what you do. You take the camera(s) out with the same film (in this case Kodachrome 25 - when you could get it processed at the Kodak Palo Alto plant---sigh....), and you shoot 200-300 exposures through each camera of the same subjects. Then you put the transparencies on a light table & start looking at them. Obviously you can't use prints because the printing process "corrects" (actually changes) the outcome so comparing prints is impossible - but you knew that.

Not much different than claiming you can hear the difference between amplifiers on the same speakers. What you notice are trends in the way the lenses reproduce the same colors when the same images are compared side-by-side. There are very subtle color shifts that you notice. I can tell the difference between my Rodenstock 4x5 lenses and my Schneider lenses. The multi-coatings are different & the color rendition & contrast is different. Same holds true for 35mm lenses. Shoot lots of film of the same subjects with different lenses on transparency film & look at the differences between the colors, contrast, etc.

A long, long time ago, I made a Cibachrome (now Ilfochrome) print of a subject using a 50mm Schneider Componon enlarging lens. Then I put an Apo-Rodagon 50mm into the enlarger & made the same print at the same f/stop & print timing & processed them. The Schneider lens was manufactured in 1968 (my first enlarging lens), and the Rodagon was manufactured in about 1989 & took advantage of all of the advances in multi-coating - and it was apo corrected. The difference was not in sharpness, but in the rendering of the reds. In the print made with the Apo-Rodagon, there was far more delicacy in the reds with many more shades to be seen.

In fact, the Rodenstock rep for the area ask me to make him a set of prints so that he could show his dealers the kind of difference the Rodenstock lens could make. You can see the same kind of difference in camera lenses also if you do 1:1 comparisons with photos of the same subject.

So, I'm not sure what "fannies judgement" you're talking about, but, if you can HEAR differences in equipment, believe me, I can SEE differences in the results from different equipment. It's all in how you've been trained and the amount of time you've put into a certain discipline. Let's just say, I have "calibrated eyes."


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