We had a chance to make a pretty fun demonstration today, and here it is. As most of you know, we're *very* finicky about our gear. We don't like even tiny scratches on front elements or dust in a lens (although a bit of that is inevitable). We're like you. We want the lens to look as good as the pictures it takes.
That said, its amazing how much dust or how many scratches a front element can take without significantly impacting image quality. Here are a couple of images taken with a lens with a fairly bad front element. You'll notice they're a bit soft and underexposed, but there's no 'image' of the scratch, just like a dust particle can't make an image on the sensor: the light bends to much through the subsequent elements for the dust or scratch to be visible in the image.
And the lens that took the images above:
As you can see, scratches and lots of dust in a lens may cause loss of contrast, loss of light gathering, and lens flare, but even so, will not be visible on the image. (In fact, our guess is most of the lost sharpness is because the optical element shifted when it broke, rather than from the cracks themselves.) Dust on the sensor may show up on an image, but dust or scratches within the lens really aren't something to worry about.
please at least post the link where you got it from if you're not the author
Posted by: anonymous | October 28, 2009 at 03:40 AM
This is where this article was taken: http://www.lensrentals.com/news/2008.10.30/front-element-scratches
I don't know if it was done with permission or not, but I would think there should at least be an acknowledgement of the original source.
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