Re: dreamy Nikon lenses
FYI, there was an interesting article describing variable soft focus portrait lens for Minolta 35mm camera written by their soft focus lens engineer several months ago on the Journal of the Society of Photographic Science and Engineering of Japan (article in Japanese, except for the figure captions, I think). Also, Konica Hexar AF uses a lens whose spherical aberration is intentionally undercorrected. It produces very nicely "soft" image superimposed on sharp image, and with crisp contrast, at wide open at f/2. It becomes more or less usual "excellent" performer at about f/3.5. Of course, due to the focusing error caused by the residual spherical aberration, rangefinder cameras and SLRs cannot afford to leave this much spherical, but Hexar AF calculates the focus error and compensates in its AF algorithm. Very clever. One thing I wish existed was a camera just like Hexar but uses 6cm square format. Ryuji
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