When shooting stills, at least in the current RAW world, the optical nature of the lens is not as critical as it once was. Back in the day of color trans film, back when one needed to really know how to work a light meter and a color meter, we used to pull 3 lenses of the same make and focal length and then test them for the best lens. Guess what, there was considerable variance. Pretty much everyone I knew then did the same, only the dumb dumbs were not testing before buying. That was before Photoshop and RAW, when lenses became a comodity. Thank god too, all those sleepless nights of waiting to see the clips from the lab and then hoping that the processing run was correctly judged, screw that. Gimme the RAW and let me sleep at night.
But now we have motion, which in terms of accuracy of exposure, color rendition and sharpness, it is rather similar to the old days of tranny film. Glass rules again. I saw Shane Halburt project 5DII footage on a 60ft screen that looked amazing, but it had PV glass on it. A whole other world. Those Canon lenses were never intended for this use. They are soft, flat although the colors really pop, and were designed to have the images imported into CS and massaged there. With stills, I want maximum information, which means a low contrast image. For motion, I want snap and detail, unless of course I don’t, then I want a choice.
For some excellent discussion of this, I recommend Shane’s blog. Also, Philip Bloom has some good information. But the mac daddy of lens reviews is Diglloyd. Yes, I paid up the $50, yes I am a nerd. If you really want to learn about lens bokeh ( that is the out of focus pattern of circles on a wide open lens) and other trivia, pay the man and learn. I found it fascinating. Excellent comparisons of the Zeiss, Canon and Nikon lenses for DSLRs. Fantastic pictorial examples and tons of data.
