"And a lot of the old glass makes nicer pictures — not sharper, but nicer."

I hear this a lot, and every time I grow more skeptical. On every conceivable technical measure, new lenses are superior to older ones. The single advantage of old lenses is, as you say, they are cheap. (I got a metal Nikon 50mm f/1.4, manual focus, for less than $100 on eBay!)

Unless you can point to some objective property of older lenses in general that assists them in taking better pictures, I'm forced to conclude that this claim is just a photographic superstition.

For certain lenses, like the old Nikon 105 2.5, you might be able to do this! But for old lenses in general I think not.

(Another thought: maybe you find the extra distortion and tint of old lenses pleasing?)

Well in the case of my cheap lens, yes I’m saying that the “flaws” result in an aesthetically pleasing image. Plus the difference in how you shoot when the camera isn’t doing the work for you.

But in general I’m unconvinced that the Cult of Sharpness is giving us creative pictures that are more fun or interesting to look at. If the tools really are that much better, shouldn’t we be seeing better photography than ten years ago?

As for objective properties: with my 100-200mm f/?? I could easily club a mugger to death, so… self-defense advantage.

Purely in terms of image quality, we are indeed seeing better photography than 10 years ago (controlling for sensor size).

I also think comments about "the camera [...] doing the work for you" or about sharp lenses not necessarily leading to fun or interesting pictures sort of misses the point. If you're a terrible piano player, you're going to be just as bad on a $100K Steinway grand as you are on a used $5K upright. But there are difficult and beautiful things you can do on the Steinway that are impossible, or least much more difficult, on the upright. Example: any piece requiring rapid soft passages, which is facilitated by the double escapement mechanism on the grand. There are amazing YouTube videos of pros playing virtuoso works on beaten-up street pianos, but I don't think any of them would deny their job would be easier on a well-maintained grand.

The same is true for photography.

Also, let's face up to the fact that judging additional distortion to be aesthetically pleasing is just nostalgia tripping. Back in the bad old days of film, lens designers worked like dogs to minimize it. (Same with film companies and grain – it was undesirable, not retro!) I'm not saying this means your aesthetic judgement is wrong or anything like that, just ... that's clearly the mechanism behind it. Someone without that cultural baggage is probably going to prefer the more correctly proportioned photo, all else being equal.

Sorry for being a little prickly here. But new lenses really are better! They're engineering marvels.

Now – for most people, taking photos that are going to be compressed (lossy) and shared online, and viewed on laptop or cell phone screens – can you really tell the difference between an old metal Nikon and a new Z series lens? Especially after distortion and tint correction in Photoshop? I think that is a much better question, and a much better argument in favor of eBaying old lenses. But again, it's an issue of choosing the right tool for the job. For big prints, you probably want the sharper, less distorted, less tinted lens. (But who among us routinely makes big prints? Not I.)

Technically modern lenses are way more accurate than vintage ones, but photography is only partly about technicalities. Lenses are so sharp nowadays that now you can spend hundreds of dollars on "black pro mist" filters, which introduce diffusion into the image. Seems silly but people like the effect. Probably because most phone cameras today can produce sharper pictures than 40 year old SLR lenses and people have gotten used to it

I think you're onto something at the end there! The commenter was almost certainly talking about subjectively "nicer" photos that have been made more interesting by the use of flawed lenses.

And this isn't an uncommon idea either. It is the idea behind lensbaby, Lomography, and the slightest resurgence of Polaroid.

My (superficial) understanding is something like: even with modern lens technology, certain design tradeoffs have to be made, e.g. between distortion and other aspects of lens performance. I have heard it said that accepting some distortion makes lenses that take pictures that look closer to those taken by "old school" film photography lenses, and also that Fujifilm deliberately favors relatively more distortion in their lens designs for exactly this reason. I think my original source for this is Thom Hogan's blog – I have not checked the technical specs to verify it (which you can easily do if you're curious by browsing lens review sites). But if it's true, maybe it's useful information to someone here!

But, the coatings on modern lenses are amazing...

(I tried reading the article without an ad blocker. When I was nearing the end, a full screen modal popped up. Closing it caused the browser to instantly return to the top of the article. Sigh...)

That's interesting about the old glass. Personally I'm into portable superzooms lately, because of the usual distance to fauna in my area, and also it's fun to ID and capture the big passenger jets at sunset. But I'd really like to explore the kinds of lenses you mentioned someday. You can definitely see a difference with the lens changes.

> I can’t quite RTFA because I have an ad blocker

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