Some of my most experienced techs can test hand held. A Few Things Before We Start You will need a tripod. Testing is a lot faster than trying out 4 copies before you decide a lens just isn’t for you. But that’s not always convenient or possible. You can just take pictures and if you don’t like the lens send it back. Nobody needs to do optical testing, of course. It can be helpful to know if the problem is with the optics of that copy, rather than the focus system, technique, or simply that the lens isn’t designed to perform any better than that. For that you do need Imatest, a bench, or just a lot of photographs.īut if you have a lens that isn’t performing like you think it should this will let you determine if the lens is optically aligned and centered properly. It’s doesn’t let you compare two different lens models and decide which is sharper.

This is not going to let you test 6 copies of a lens and determine which is the absolute sharpest copy on your camera. But let me be clear about this is not, so I don’t waste your time if you wanted something else.

Siemens star testchart