I trust you've had a good week.
When time permits, I'm desperately searching for a lens tuned/ corrected specifically for 1:20 (0.05x) to 1:5 (0.2x), with my preference leaning more towards the 1:20 side and more towards north of 60 mm focal length.
I need it to document flat artworks, ranging from about 0.5x0.5m to 1x1meters in size, with the camera being about 3 or 4 meters behind the artwork. I'm currently doing stitches ranging from about 350MP to 600MP on a monorail 4x5 with Sony A7Rm4 at the back. It's important for me that the lens is flat-field as the opposite affects my stitches badly (see Nikkor 55/2.8 below).
My art is mostly black and white, with tiny accents of color here and there. The result is that my artwork shows severe amounts of chromatic aberration when photographed, especially in the corners. It seems finding a lens that is flat-field and a true apochromat at 1:20 is an almost impossible task.
Below are the lenses I own, that are not up to the task:
- Nikon 55/2.8 micro-Nikkor AIS: slightly too much CA, not truly flat-field at 1:20, image circle prevents any movements
- Nikon 105/2.8 micro-Nikkor AIS: far too much CA, image circle prevents any movements
- Schneider Symmar-S 180mm f/5.6: slightly too much CA
- Makro-Symmar HM 120 f/5.6: far too much CA as out of mag range
- Schneider Componon-S 80mm f/4: slightly too much CA and less sharp than Nikon 105/2.8 micro-Nikkor
- Schneider SAPPHIRE 0.007/0.07x V70 16K line scan lens: mag range and MTF curve seems near-perfect
- Zeiss Orthoplanar 60/ 105mm: mag range and sharpness sounds great on paper, but so little info online
- Makro Symmar 80 5.6 -0.033x version: mag range sounds promising, but almost impossible to find a copy, even from Schneider themselves
- Rayfact 63mm f/2.8 N: optimized for 1:20 to 1:1 (perfect) but impossible to find and from lens design papers it seems it's basically an EL 63 Nikkor 2.8 N with a Rayfact price tag... and I'm not convinced that lens is free of CA, judging from sample images on Flickr
- Super Symmar HM 120: seems promising, but infinity corrected, and judging by Makro Symmar HM, it's not the sharpest, even though its CA control is amazing
Johan.