I wasn’t having a shot at you specifically, I was sharing my general observation. I have performed similar tests to what you have done here with many lenses and for a time fell into the trap of letting the technical considerations take priority. Now- if I want to shoot at f1.2 for extremely shallow focus I will, even though I know a couple of stops closed down on the aperture will give a significantly sharper image viewed at 100%, I will also stop down to where I know I will see the effects of diffraction on a 100% view, the reality is there is two stops or greater latitude to where this will be perceptible to most people in a print viewed at a reasonable distance. It would be interesting to see how your test shots compare when all viewed full screen uncropped.
Fair enough... I must have been overdue for a coffee. I do agree with that and also do not have as strict boundaries with my DSLR gear - although with that gear provided the subject is in focus the quality is so good that diffraction is irrelevant in normal viewing almost throughout the whole aperture range (you really do need to pixel peep to see flaws in excellent gear).
On the other hand this little lens is far from great and on a 4K TV video and images are almost close to 1:1 and being viewed at 100% where flaws do poke out more. Naturally - out of focus is out of focus - and the previous focus test viewed uncropped looks bad when focus is even slightly off the small 10m-infinity window as the focus roll off is rapid with this lens leaving less room for give or take leeway or much trust in the auto focus system. Unless trying to capture a 1m-5m selfie there really is only 3 focus settings for everything else (infinity to 2 markers off infinity and it is splitting hairs in this small range so basically manually focus once and then forget about focusing for each scene as such... its fairly useless for the most part).
I will test again the aperture and curious to see the results cropped and uncropped too.
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