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'Battle of the Bokeh' Beauty Contest Blind-Tests Canon, Nikon, and Sigma 35mm F/1.4 Lenses

02.14.13 @ 6:04PM Tags : 35mm, battleofthebokeh, bokeh, camera, canon, dslr, lens, lenses, nikkor, nikon, performance, shooting, shootout, sigma, test

When considering lens options for purchase or rental, certain criteria may stand out to you more than others. This depends on what you shoot most often, or what a project demands. Perhaps as a run-and-gun doc shooter, you simply need the extra stop you get with one 85mm lens for the same price as another that doesn’t vignette as badly. Or you gave up a contrast performance you really preferred in favor of the IS lens of greater overall value. But what if money were no object, and focal length and speed were matched? An aspect you’d find yourself evaluating closely is the way each handles its bokeh, or de-focused areas of the image. DigitalRev’s latest Battle of the Bokeh is a comparison between Canon, Nikon, and Sigma 35mm f/1.4 lenses in precisely this spirit — with some unexpected results. More »

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PPBM5 Can Settle the Mac-vs-PC Editing Debate with Hard Numbers

08.4.10 @ 11:30AM Tags : adobe, apple, cs5, editing, mac, nvidia, pc, performance

Mac vs. PC is a never-ending debate, but when it comes to video editing, what we need are hard and fast numbers. It would be impossible to generate a comparison of apples to apples (zing?) by using Final Cut Pro, since that NLE is only available on one platform. Instead, Adobe’s CS5 suite is the ideal candidate — and considering CS5 is 64-bit native on both OSes, it should be a fair fight. The best way to settle this would be to open the exact same CS5 project file on a Mac and a PC, play it back, render it out, and measure it in other ways — on various machines, at different price points — and compare the results. If only someone would create such a benchmarking tool and upload the results to a database… As it turns out, someone has done just this. More »