As you might imagine, people started to criticize the test, explained that Stephan must have used a bad copy and started various theories as to what the test was really showing. Photographers can be quite opinionated people and many do not like when expensive brand names are criticized. Such is life.
Quite pointedly, Stephan gave a link to the official FTM charts at Sony Japan and explained that if people doubted the results of test, they could redo it and post their own results.
Fair enough, here is my version of the test.
The lens I could gather for the test are:
-the Sony Carl Zeiss 24-70 f/2.8 (of course)
-the Minolta 24-105 f/3.5-4.5 (the same as Stephan used)
-the Tamron 28-75 f/2.8 (which should be of the same optical design as the Sony 28-75 f/2.8 that Stephan used).
I could not find the Minolta 28-135mm f/4-4.5 or Minolta 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5.
In all fairness, I should add that my copy of the Tamron behaves a bit strangely. I made particular efforts to get proper focus, but nevertheless what you see here may not represent the best that this lens can do.
The setup of the test is very simple, it is just a landscape image with the horizon diagonal through the corners. Here is the full picture, reduced for the web:
The tables in the following pages are crops at the pixel level, corner crop on the left and center crop on the right. The corner pictures are taken at the same place as Stephan (as far as I can tell): 200 pixels from the corner:
The center pictures are narrower for the table to fit on the page. The center pictures are just here so that we can see whether the lens was focused correctly (they come from the same file as the corner crops). We are not here to judge center sharpness here, everyone agrees that the CZ is quite sharp at the center.
Pictures were taken free-hand for lack of time (but we can check from the center pictures that there is no camera motion blur) and the raw files were processed in Apple's Aperture. No sharpening was added.
On the next page, the pictures at 28mm.
