On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 03:29:52 GMT, danksta@ns.sympatico.ca (Terry Danks) wrote:
>On Fri, 22 Jan 1999 14:19:33 +1300, Boon-Li Ong
> wrote:

>>...which alludes to my original point: not everything is quantifiable.
>>you have to discard your need for a scientific evaluation (i.e.
>>quantifiability) and evaluate the result objectively. and trust me, it
>>is easy to identify a good bokeh from a bad bokeh. it can be quantified
>>by quantification has to be relative and not objective.

>This is anathema to me. I had hoped I left this kind of thinking
>behind in the audio/hi-fi groups.
>If it doesn't stand up to a double blind test . . . it isn't real.
>My $.02

I agree... (being myself a recovering audiomaniac...;-).
Perception is a funny thing, which can be "tilted" by
the oddest of events. In audio, I often had a firm belief
in the "clear audibility" of one or another characteristic,
only to see the perception of it change with a mere word,
or even a simple test...;-) My current scepticism about
audio "mysteries" is rather high, as it is for similar
claims in photography. Which is not to say that some rather
subtle differences don't exist - but they are generally
measurable, also... (It is fun to show that most everyone
can hear a 1/8db change in audio frequency response, if
it occurs over a wide enough frequency range - and to show
on a 'scope with a 1kHz square-wave trace what happens
to it when exchanging the amp, the speaker, and sometimes
just the wire. The source of the "different" sound [which
is described by all those flowery audio-terms...] is
obviously evident... [I refer to audiomania as "the art
of applying 1/8th db corrections to 10db errors..." ;-])
I guess in photography, I ask for lenses that have good
sharpness and contrast to the corners at wide stops and
over a wide focus range, and which are acceptably low in
flare, color variation, and mechanical problems... I did
not like the images made by some of the "favored"
German lenses - they were often too soft at wide stops
for my taste. And I actually prefer the images made with
lenses with "bad bokeh"...! (There are samples on my web
page [under "Aht Fotoz" and "Sun-Plants"] that depend
on "bad bokeh" - they could not have been made without
it! ;-) I think, in general, from about f5.6 at medium
to long focus distances with most good non-zoom lenses
from any source, people would be hard-put to see
significant differences in images that could be attributed
to the lens' "magic" inherent pecular qualities...
(the "magic" shows at wider stops...! ;-).