Just remember that quality in, quality out. I had a large set of PK
lenses and when I purchased an Olympus E-300 got a PK adapter and tried
them out. One learns quickly that some of them are indeed better suited
than others. What this means is that a very high quality prime or even
zoom (my old Tokina ATX 50-250 for example) can give excellent results,
and here I include an OM 1.8 50mm (great for portraits and relatively
low light situations). The sensor is grabbing from the center of the
lens, and that's where the glass is usually best. The other thing to
remember is that manual focusing requires a lot of attention. I found
it took some dioper fine tuning of a very critical kind to get the
results I wanted. As for lenses which companies like Nikon, Canon,
Sigma, etc. say are suitable I just don't know. I have absolute
confidence in the Zuikos Oly is building.

Isn't it odd how so many of those "ancient" Leica and Zeiss lenses
work so very well on digital that serious photographers pay premiums
for them?

Even stranger is Rich doesn't even have dSLR, so why's he care.

**********************************************************

"A combat photographer should be able to make you see the
color of blood in black and white"

                    David Douglas Duncan
                Speaking on why in Vietnam
             he worked only in black and white
     http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/exhibitions/online/ddd/

Probably all that plastic.

STFU

"Just not suitable" means "your camera explodes"?
No?

Well, what does it mean?  It means that good canon primes on a
$7,000 16 MP camera are --- if used with skill --- well able to
rival slower, much larger Zeiss medium format lenses, where the
25 MP backend alone costs $30,000 (+ $3,500 for the camera).
Yes, up to the resolution of the sensor.

(incidentally, "a camera like the 1Ds MKII is superior by at
least 1 to two stops when it comes to low noise.")

It means that a view camera with a even larger lens (35mm (24mm
equiv) f/5.6, extra-large image circle for shifting up to 2 cm)
--- which with the same backend comes to $35,000 and has neither
rangefinder nor ground glass and of course no auto focus, not
even a light meter, of course no exposure automatics at all ---
and stepping the lens down to f/11-f/16 (for depth of field and
image quality), can outperform that medium format camera.

Oh, did I mention that you want a center filter (which costs
you another 2 stops of light) to control vignetting for that
lens?  So that --- from calculating exposure --- you have
f/22-f/32?

And while the author has shown that his $30,000 backend does
better with special lenses, no such thing was shown for
Canon.  Oh, medium format used to need less resolution for
it's lenses, since it was not enlarged as much (or so the author
claims).  _Could_ that be a reason why these lenses can be
improved upon?

Which proves:
=> Rich cannot read, just rant.  (He'd gladly put the cheapest
  mobile phone lens on a Canon 1Ds, just to show us how bad the
  1Ds is --- if Rich even had any DSLR, that is)
=> Canon has very fine lenses, rivalling even lenses out of
  it's class.  And that for a quarter of the price.
=> Canon's much faster.  (no need for a beep when an image
  has finally been stored on the CF.)
=> Canon's lenses are faster.
=> Canon's superior for low light situations.
=> If you have that amount of money, you can always get
  something better.  It won't make your images any better,
  though, unless you already get perfect images with your
  current gear.

-Wolfgang

For those of you who didn't have the stamina to read the whole
article, here's my summary version, suitable for podcasting:

SLR blah blah lenses blah resolution blah Zeiss Contax blah blah
megapixels quality blah blah midlife crisis blah 39 megapixels blah
blah Linhof blah blah Schneider blah blah special for digital blah blah
$50,000 worth of photo equipment at retail blah blah I haven't taken
any pictures with it yet but I'm going on a trip soon blah blah.

My text version doesn't have any of the photos.  But since all the
photos were of the equipment rather than with it, you're probably
not missing much.  Or you could just read some advertising brochures.