I cannot point to side by side image tests, but as a general rule high magnification and long working distance do not play well together.Babylonia wrote:Has anybody experienced the quality in using more long enlarger lenses reversed at a long bellows (e.g. using a bellows camera as Sinar) to this 5x enlargement value? I guess it still doesn't give the best quality as the results of e.g. a 50mm reversed EL Nikkor as tested at the first message is not that best, but also the test of the above link to an Apo Rodagon 50mm doesn't give the results as expected.
The problem is that to get the same resolution from two setups, you need to have the same aperture (angular width of the entrance cone) and you need to have equally small aberrations.
But it turns out that aberrations scale in proportion to the absolute size of the lens. Given the same designs and just different sizes, if a 25 mm f/4 lens has 1/4 wavelength error, then the corresponding 50 mm f/4 lens will have 1/2 wavelength and 100 mm f/4 would have a full 1 wavelength error. The small lens would be good, the middle lens not very, and the big lens pretty bad.
In practical terms, this means that to get the same image quality, the long & large lens needs to be not only bigger but also better designed and manufactured. This can be done, but it costs more -- potentially quite a lot more. So again it's the old story of three features: You can have long WD, high quality, and modest cost -- but only two at a time (at best).
--Rik