 Full frame
Here's a fun new parlour game: take a Nikon 14mm and try to focus it wide open - anywhere at all. Instead of a plane of focus, you will find yourself wrestling with a weird 3D toroidal field of focus extending behind an in front of where you want it. Net result: baby soft centre frame surrounded by a ring of much higher resolution with a radius of 5-12mm, fading into dark, mushy corners. Here's a few judiciously chosen 100% crops to illustrate.
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| Canon 14mm at f2.8 (centre) |
Nikon 14mm at f2.8 (centre) |
Quite respectable - in fact, very good wide open performance from the Canon - and surely a focus error with the Nikon? But here's another 100% crop just a few metres along what I had laughingly come to think of in the traditional sense as the 'plane' of focus:
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| Canon 14mm at f2.8 (centre) |
Nikon 14mm at f2.8 (centre) |
Yes - not only the same lens at the same aperture, it's the same capture - cripplingly soft in the centre, surrounded by a ring of extremely high resolution. Needless to say both have fairly soft corners wide open . . .
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| Canon 14mm at f2.8 (corner) |
Nikon 14mm at f2.8 (corner) |
Again, impressive performance in the extreme corner from the Canon, but someone seems to have replaced my fabulously desirable and expensive EDIF Nikon with a Cheapola Distortamat. Hard to convey exactly how disappointed I am with the Nikon at this point, not to mention the fact that it took 12 exposures to even work out where the focus was.
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