For photo, there are a few candidates, but with nuances
DpReview comes to mind
They do measurements, for sure
Their scoring is... contested.
But the main problem is that they are very much linked to business actors (Amazon pulled the plug recently, so I suppose they rely even more on other sponsors)
DxoMark was a subsidiary of Dxo.
Dxo is a French company that specialized in RAW photography development and lens correction.
They were quite unique for that initially, but now almost every camera has lens correction on board or in software. Photoshop also has it now. Nevertheless, Dxo software still pulls ahead in some area.
(By the way, the product pictures I post here are mostly processed through Dxo software, as are the photos I display -and ssle- in exhibitions.)
Dxo has developed its own target-based test protocol, which is used by Dpreview Chasseur d'images and others.
Their ratings are often contested (sounds familiar?), but their measurements base is second to none, and very useful when you know how to read it.
They also measure camera and smartphones.
Imatest is the other target based lens measurement tool. It's cheaper than Dxo and, therefore, more widely used.
(I own an Imatest license and measured a few lenses myself in the past)
EPhotozine and the likes use it and add measurements to their lens review.
There are 2 issues with target based measurements:
First, since the Camera has a major impact on the results, they can't be compared between camera models.
People most often forget (or just don't know) thzt and end up with plain false conclusions.
Second, the distance between camera and target is fixed by the lens angle of view and the target size.
While for tele it's not a big issue (if you have enough place in your room), for wide lenses, the measurement is done at distances very different than in real life.
For a 12mm lens on a full frame sensor, you'd need a (huge) 2m high target to be at 1m (1012mm) from the sensor. Not a very realistic use case.
At
LensRentals, they rent lenses. A lot of lenses.
And
they developed their own in-house optical bench based protocol to check returned lenses.
The optical bench is limited to fully open aperture, but results are independent of the camera. And at infinity distance.
Typically, they measure several samples -at least 10- of the same lens. That is therefore more statistically representative and they xan also get an idea of a lens results variability.
This is, however, a good complement to target based measurements
(To find a measurement, Google for "Lensrentals" "MTF" and the lens model you're interested in)
Sadly, they stopped publishing measurements, probably under pressure of Canon, their main commercial partner, for which they never published a measurement of any of their new RF lenses.
(NB: This is just my guess. I have no evidence of that.
The reason is easy to understand: while target based result will show better results, since modern camera include correction of the major lens flaws, the optical bench would show that in full light, which would be embarrassing for Canon, Nikon, Sony and the others.
But the reason could also be that it's too hard and not worth developing a mount for those new fully electronic lenses.)
Other interesting, science based, photo related sites of interest:
PhotonsToPhotos, to know all about camera sensor noise and dynamic range.
And, last but not least, Jim Kasson's blog "
The Last Word".
Jim is a retired electrical engineer and engineering manager who worked at HP and IBM, an innovative photographer, and a very imaginative scientific explorer of camera and lenses technologies.
His blog also allows comments, which helps him tuning his protocols.
tftcentral.co.uk
www.nytimes.com
eneloop101.com
www.tomshardware.com
