Testing lenses at home?

tjwspm

tjwspm

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Who has ever tested lenses at home? What experiences have you had with this?
In order to test the resolution of cameras for which there were no evaluations yet, I was forced to carry out tests myself. But I had never done this seriously before, so I had to find out more first. There are many tips online, but they were either too technically complex or they were just the author's emotional assessments.

I was tired of hearing 'creamy bokeh' and 'sharp corners' in lens review videos. With a little effort, I could carry out meaningful lens tests at home. The results may not be as good as professional laboratory tests, but in most cases they were sufficient to get to know my own lenses better.

Do you have any ideas or comments on how to improve my process?
I've written down what I did here:
moments-of-now.com

Testing lenses

This guide covers methods like using Siemens star and USAF 1951 test charts, measuring line pairs per millimeter, and practical field tests.
moments-of-now.com moments-of-now.com
 
Thanks for sharing, interesting
The raidiating lines test looks useful for macro lenses
The only thing that I have done to check that my gear is working properly is to try to test at the distance that the lens will be used at using something that has details
Macro setup usually in the garden on flowers or insects
Telephoto setups in my opinion there is no point trying to test at home as the subjects (wildlife) will be at a greater distance
I was mainly checking that the DSLR camera micro adjustment was correct, haven’t had the need to now I’m on mirrorless
 
Only after people on here had commented that a lens looked "off" - I took a photo of the roof tiles of the house across the street and one side was blurrier than the other. The lens went in to Fuji, who fixed it FoC. Then I did the test again to confirm that it was fixed.
 
Test charts is a common way. The main pitfalls are:
1. You may have camera at a slight tilt relative to the chart, giving you false impression about edge performance
2. This test only tells you about performance at or near MFD, which may very substantially differ from infinity and may miss out field curvature and so on.

So a vital if less scientific final step is to get on top of a fairly steep hill and shoot a detailed landscape all at infinity with a very high resolution camera. Then sell that soft lens :LOL:
 
In the old days it was the old-fashioned broadsheet newspaper sticky-taped onto garage door and just making sure the camera was level with the middle of the printed sheet. And then shoot a load of film..

Great if you had a garage-door.

A lot of the modern cameras do have an auto AF fine tune function, just set up the camera and point at something with a lot of small text. I've stumped up for Reikan Focal and it has given me confidence in some lenses I wasn't so sure about and for others justification for moving them on.
 
An interesting article, but how do you view the test images without introducing errors.
 
seaodyssey said:
An interesting article, but how do you view the test images without introducing errors.
Click to expand...
You definitely have to pay attention to the entire process chain. I use the Adox cms 20 for the test photos. For digitizing I photograph the negatives with a Sony alpha 7 at 61 Mpixel. At the same time, I analyzed the negatives with a professional Wild-Heerbrugg 3z Combistereo microscope with a Leitz 25mm/2.8 lens and achieved similar results with both methods.


And yes, one of my favorite photos is completely blurry :)
 
I only test my lenses for decentering as a matter of course, I only test my lenses for other things if I notice something obviously amiss when I've been out shooting. Test level sharpness doesn't interest me, I'm more interested in how the lens renders. I always research my lenses first so I know I'm buying a sharp lens, but if it's soft when using it I'll look into why.
 
Never tested a lens for technical factors.
Have tested a lens that was decentered too check what the focus problem was.simply by shooting a wall.
For the most part a few shots at each aperture give sufficient information about if it good enough for my usage.
I can't be bothered. With lens charts and the like.
Lenses are so good these days it is more a question of eliminating the damaged and faulty ones.
 
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