Hi,
I am the OP, and this thread was started with potential buyers of the Hasselblad VFC-50c in mind. The main purpose was to share some test images of the lenses I possess as a mean of assessing lens quality before making a major investment in a digital back.
One reader, over at LuLa, felt that this informations was sufficient to buy into the Hasselblad system. I also guess that it helped some people on this thread to get better insight into the Hasselblad lenses.
Now, we need to keep in mind that many of these designs are like thirty years old. They have been intended to be used with film and were designed before many new technologies arrived. Just to mention, we now have mouldable aspherics, SD glass, high refraction index glass and a lot of new technologies both simplifying and improving optical designs.
Regarding the age, these lenses do a remarkably good job, but they have some limitations. Just as an example all Distagons are floating element designs, but the floating element is not connected to focusing, except the Distagon 40/4 IF, which is a very special lens that is seldom found at a very high price.
The 120/4 Macro Planar has very ugly MTF curves and they show in real world images, but stopped down to f/11 or f/16 it is pretty good at infinity. It is intended for close distances, however, where it really shines. Zeiss themselves are very clear on not recommending the Planar 120/4 for large size objects, for anything larger than one square meter they recommend the Planar 100/3.5, which is also an excellent lens.
The Zeiss 120/4 APO Planar for Contax is an entirely different lens from the Hasselblad 120/4, it has two extra elements and floating elements (that is variable air space between different groups) coupled to internal focusing.
Knowing the strengths and weaknesses of lenses may be helpful to make the right choices, but also helpful to make best use of them.
Initially there was just one f/4, f/8 and f/16 shot of each lens, but later I added more real world samples a couple for each lens. The aperture series show strengths/weaknesses at each aperture, while the real world examples try to illustrate more creative use of the lenses.
A photographer calling him(?)self PSon published wonderful portraits. I am deeply thankful. But, the images I posted are full resolution, you can download them if you want to. If you want to do your raw processing, just download the raw image and do your raw processing. If you want print large, just try.
But, this thread is about tools, and not art. Tools can be useful, but don't make art. On the other hand, what constitutes art is not decided by the photographer but the viewers.
It may seem technobabble to you, but if someones is expected to spend like 12000 k$US on a back it may be nice to have some information about how it will perform. That is what this thread is about.
Personally, I don't consider myself an 'Artist'. I see myself as an engineer having photography as a hobby. Hopefully I make some good images, there are actually some people who feel I do that. That's nice.
Best regards
Erik
Nobody is jumping at tech threads. But there are several art oriented threads that de-evolved into technobabble (Not talking about this particular one)