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Zeiss Otus 55mm f/1.4 APO-Distagon
(prototype)

Extreme Contrast Lighting

Lens tested here was a prototype lens.

Examples on this page with the 36-megapixel Nikon D800E.

These examples take on the extreme contrast situation—

What happens to lens contrast in large dark areas as well as fine detail areas when an extremely bright sky has the potential to gray-out the contrast in the dark areas?

We might call this “real world MTF”. Let us consider a presumed “peer” lens, e.g., the the Leica 50mm f/2 APO-Summicron-M ASPH. The real-world MTF of the Leica 50/2 APO ASPH is massively degraded by this kind of lighting to the point of being unusable. Field comparisons made this obvious, a fact this author asserted early on garnering vociferous disagreement, but Leica later issued a lens recall since reality can be denied only for a time (at Zeiss, the 50/2 AA would never have exited the prototype stage, not meeting the quality standards expected for Zeiss optics).

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Variants adjusted, shot available in full article
f/4.5 @ 1/5000 sec, ISO 100, Shadows +100, Contrast +40
Nikon D800E + 55/1.4 APO-Distagon prototype

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