On Mon, 03 Mar 2003 14:11:24 -0500, Alan Browne <alan.browne@videotron.ca> wrote:

[...]

>Why did I post this? I get tired of people (usually Nikonites) crapping

>on Minolta, so I decided to see how bad Minolta was. Second place

>amongst Canon and Nikon ain't bad, is it? Esp. with Nikon getting a

>third place showing!

[...]

Hmmm....;-)

Well, in my little test, I bought a Minolta

system that its owner praised (he also owned

Nikon gear...). Of the four common lenses,

a 28mm, a 35-105, a 50 macro, and a 100-300,

I would have to rate all but the macro

"mediocre", and considerably inferior to the

Nikkor equivalents. The macro was excellent.

Minolta and others do make individual lenses

that are quite good, but my impression over the

years of trying out MANY lenses is that (until

fairly recently, with the cheap Nikkor AF

lenses) the Nikkor line consisted overwhelmingly

of "better-than-average-performance" lenses,

unlike other lines where the poorer lenses

occupied a much greater percentage of the line.

It is not just the top-end lenses that define a

line's quality, but the performance level of

the bulk of the lenses in the line. With

Minolta, Canon, etc., "cherry-picking" has

been more necessary than in the Nikon lens

line to assure having a set of good lenses,

and among Nikkors, every important FL is

represented by a high-quality lens version

(and the VERY few "dogs" that existed in the

line were well-known, and represented a very

tiny proportion of the line...). Alas, with

these bottom-end cheap AF Nikkor lenses, some

of this is gradually changing...

(see: www.David-Ruether-Photography.com/slemn.html)