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 ...
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