[mst]

Hey, best of luck with moving out to a better office! Hope the new place is better in every possible aspect, not only price.

Thank you That's what I'm hoping for, too.

I have two questions: first being - why C1?

Personal preference and the wish to have less software to deal with. Personal preference first: I'm a long-time Apple Aperture user, actually used it since the first version was released (and found the original boxes and discs of Aperture 2 and 3 yesterday amidst all the stuff I've been hoarding in the office ). I loved the DAM part and still think that nothing comes close in this regard. For my own needs, I wanted a single solution that has proven to be mostly stable and reliable and combines raw conversion with a media library. That pretty much narrows the choices down to either C1 or LR. Of those two, I liked C1 better, especially the consistency of their results.

For the reviews, a mixture of converters has been used in the past, mostly ACR, C1 and Iridient Developer. Iridient is based on dcraw, but it completely lacks the DAM part. C1 allows more or less the same workflow for all test systems now (at least for my workflow, Klaus has other preferences) and also has the advantage that I have all images for the reviews in one library now... from vignetting-JPGs to the sample images. Not including the RAWs for MTF measurements, though. That's so much data that it gets offloaded to a NAS after the review is done.

You're right that C1 applies different sharpening depending on the camera used. That's actually a really welcoome approach, because different sensor have different charasteristics (due to different AA filters used, for example), so in order to achieve identical or at least similar results, different sharpening parameters are required.

Second - should image resolution be measured before or after distortion correction is applied? While I'm very curious to see the impact, I wonder whether it makes sense to measure before distortion correction, because that's the actual optical resolution. The correction itself involves some software tricks which can vary across RAW converters, if the profile is available at all, so not exactly consistent.

Yep, true. Still, our main interest here is lens performance, so the native performance of the lens without any software influence, if possible. With software correction becoming more and more popular though, we can not ignore the impact it might have on the results one can achieve with a lens.
Hence the approach to primarily show the native performance of the lens and (for lenses with fairly high distortion) also the impact of software correction. The latter as a rough guidance, of course the results will vary depending on what converter is used.

My predictions:
Optical: 3
Mechanical: 4.5
Value: 3.5

That's very optimistic

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BTW I was thinking of establishing a testing space right where I work, but the expense of getting properly set up for that kinda gave me pause. Other than that, guess it would've been viable - it's a large-ish room usually with very few other people hanging around, certainly so since the coronavirus lockdowns had started...

Sounds like a good place for that, but yes... getting things set up requires some investment of either money or time. Some things need to be bought (some bright lights and a really sturdy tripod obviously... and a big and solid easel to hold the charts proved to be a good investment, too), some you can build yourself, like the charts.

If you feel the urge again and can't resist it, drop me a line. I'll try to be as helpful as I can, but that might include trying to talk you out of it Because the actual and often annoying work starts after everything was set up...