An interesting article by Mike Johnston on lenses, tucked away for posterity on the net by M.C. Lau, to whom many thanks.

Stricly for us gearheads...

-- Mani Sitaraman (bindumani@pacific.net.sg), May 20, 2002

Answers

It's very interesting, I read with delight the definition of "Bokeh".

It reinforce me against my friend and professional photographer Serge about the Leica CL. To me it's a lovely camera, nice to use and few spherical distorsion from the 40mm. It suits me and this is enough!!! Xavier.

-- Xavier d'Alfort (hot_billexf@hotmail.com), May 21, 2002.

Just to add a small bit on the subject of Mike Johnston, I subscribed to his newsletter , "The 37th Frame" after a review on this site for the last issue. I was surprised that the whole process was quite retro for these days... you send a check in the mail and the newsletter arrives in a large envelope. The letter is not huge, but when you consider that it accepts no advertising, it is all content. The first issue I received, number 3 had a mix of the technical (rating the 35mm lenses, part 1), opinion (the Rant) and humor (article: How to write internet user reports for cameras... a guide for idiots. Step 5..."it is not necessary to own or have tried a camera to review it.") All in all, 16 pages of real material is probably pretty close to say, Popular Photography when you cut out all of the advertisements.

If you have a spare 18 Dollars laying around, check out the 37th frame. I'm looking forward to the next issue.

-- Al Smith (smith58@msn.com), May 21, 2002.

Ya gotta love Mike's approach. Here's a guy who can see through the B.S. of lens bench tests to the real point of photography.

Yeah, I love my M6's and the pile of glass that goes with 'em, but not because they have super-human resolving powers and off-the-scale MTF charts. I love 'em because they make Tri-X look so damn good!

-- Bob (bobflores@attbi.com), May 21, 2002.

Here, here, Bob! Well said.

-- Marc Williams (mwilliams111313MI@comcast.net), May 22, 2002.