High Definition Cinematography, 2nd Edition

18

Lenses

18.1  How to choose a lens

There are many parameters that define a good lens and separate a good lens from a bad one. For High Definition Cinematography, where there is a mixture of both film and video backgrounds, the most important include resolution – that is what is the smallest dot in the scene that can accurately be recorded; contrast – does the lens have a short hard tonal range or a long gentle one; color rendition – this breaks down into two separate parameters, the overall color hue of the image and edge fringing; and finally breathing – which describes the effect of an image size change when the lens focus is racked.

18.1.1  Resolution

There are many ways to define the resolution of a lens, but the simplest is to consider ...