MervinJ wrote in message <345d5fa4.16218671@news.cyberspc.mb.ca>...

>The quality of a lens can be proven in the darkroom . Is there any
>indication of there qualities when viewing through the viewfinder of a
>slr. I realise obvious things like glass misalighnment can be easily
>seen, but what about the subtle differences like sharpness.


In years of checking LOTS of lenses (see my web page, under "I babble"),
I have never been able to correlate SLR viewfinder image appearance
with film image quality - except for lens/film non-parallelism. Many lenses
look crisp and snappy in the finder, and are not on film; many look bad
in the finder, fine on the film. The finder image is not a very
high-magnification one, and brightness/contrast may have more to
do with interactions between lens and finder optics than with the
quality of either.
Hope This Helps
David Ruether - http://www.fcinet.com/ruether