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Many times I've read
comments as "wow, what a sharp photo!
The lens xyz is really sharp" or "I
think that xyz is a sharp lens, I've
seen very sharp photos on
Pbase/photo.net/your website/etc."
This is a wrong assumption: it is
impossible to judge the sharpness of a
lens from web-sized (700-1000px) photos.
If you want to see the real sharpness of
a lens, you have to look at full
resolution image samples, or 100% crop.
Here is a demonstration. Both
these two photos looks sharp at web
size:

From these images, I
think that everyone would think that
they are both very sharp, and that both
photos had been taken with high quality,
professional lenses. But actually, one
is extremely soft, while the other one
is razor sharp, as you can see from
these 100% crops:

There is an huge
difference, even though at web size both
looks sharp! When you resize a
photo for web, you get a low-resolution
image, that does not show the actual
detail of the photo, so it is not
possible to see the difference between
a razor sharp lens and a very poor lens.
When you are evaluating a lens, never
thrust web-sized images!
Do you have
comments or questions?
If you have comments or questions about
this article, feel free to ask in the
Juza
Nature Photography Discussion Forum!
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