The other day I came across a discussion about Lens Rental’s blog post on lens variation. In retrospect it should be pretty obvious that there is going to be variation between lenses. In fact, any old hat photographer knows that some copies of lenses are gems and others are total bombs, even when we’re talking about high quality lenses. In fact, I’ve wanted to characterize the variance in a statistically meaningful way for sometime, only I have neither the personal collection of lenses, or the clout to get any manufacture to ship me the lenses to test.

Fortunately Roger at Lens Rentals.com was interested enough to start studying his lenses. The results are, well both shocking and not really surprising at all. In any case there article is well worth a read.