Rendition of highlitghts in out of focus areas.

Has any one looked at the ability of Leica lenses to keep out of focus highlights orderly and compact. After examining many slides shot thru good Canon, Nikon and Leica glass, I have noticed a consistent difference in the way out of focus highlights are rendered. My Canon L and Nikon pro-zooms seem to magnify and distort out of focus highlights to the detriment of in focus picture elements. Has any one else observed this?

Do a web search for "bokeh" and you'll find out more than you ever

wanted to know :-)

Pedro

 

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This bokeh business is beaten to death in photonet. However, I think

it fair to say that Leica lenses are generally thought to have very

good bokeh characteristics- perhaps the older generations might have

even better bokeh than the current crop. Zoom lenses generally give

the "worst" bokeh compared to any prime. I suspect this is due to the

complexity of their optical designs. A symmetrically arranged lens is

often thought to give inherently nice bokeh (a double gauss type of

design, for example). The Japanese are thought to obsess over the

number of blades in an aperture on the assumption that the more there

are makes for a more perfectly circular diaphragm and therefore

better bokeh.

 

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Certainly I do agree that this is an important characteristic of a

good lens, but the problem is that there is no way to accurately

characterize it in my opinion, nor really to grade it. We might agree

that a lens has "bad" bokeh and another has "good", but graduations

in between are difficult. Also so much deopends on the aperture

selected, and the distance of the object in focus and the background

distance and so on. Basically we know what it is and we know what we

don't like, but I doubt whether there are really any meaningful

comparisons between say Leica and Canon bokeh that compares truly

like with like.

 

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From my own experience I think that 35-100mm primes are the lenses

that show the nicest bokeh.