LENS ELEMENTS & IMAGE QUALITY

LENS ELEMENTS & IMAGE QUALITY

Optical aberrations occur when points of the image do not translate back onto single points after passing through the lens, causing image blurring, reduced contrast or misalignment of colors (chromatic aberration). Lenses may also suffer from uneven, radially decreasing image brightness (vignetting) or distortion. Try moving your mouse over each of the options below to see how these can impact image quality for extreme cases.

Any of the above problems is present to some degree with any lens. In the rest of this tutorial, when a lens is referred to as having lower optical quality than another lens, this is manifested as some combination of the above artifacts. Some of these lens artifacts may not be as objectionable as others, depending on the subject matter.