Whoa. This kind of shocked me. The only conclusion I can draw from this is don't bother buying a high aperture lens (i.e. fast <f2) for a DSLR. You are just throwing money into a hole.

That's some pretty significant news to make public. I'd never read anything indicating this response from CMOS nor how the manufacturers were compensating by boosting sensitivity.

It doesn't look like CCD is on the roadmap for the big guns, so it will be interesting to see what if anything comes from their camps regarding this report.

The data presented does not support that conclusion.
The text accompanying the data suggests that as a possible future finding, but as yet it is unsupported by fact.

With the best modern cameras, a 1/2 stop increase in ISO (what the graphs suggested) has near-zero effect on quality. And the suggestion that depth-of-field is adversely affected to a large degree, is just that: an unproven suggestion.

Definitely something worth keeping an eye on, but so far it's just a sensationalist article.

Cheers

I agree that a 1/2 stop increase is probably not significant. However I would bet that losing off-axis lightrays is going to affect depth of field. You can't lose that much light without it affecting something.

What a load of crap!

Money is never wasted on good quality lenses, don't get me wrong I regularly bump the ISO beyond 3200 when I'm shooting weddings but there is a limit. Without my f1.4 I wouldn't be able to do some of the work I do.

When you take your photography seriously you know the lens is where it's all happening, it's always going to be the limiting factor, you can't get a great picture from a crappy lens by simply bumping the ISO. The same picture shot with a better lens would always be better. Fact.

Cheers

Cris

Cris is right, of course, except when your more expensive lens is too damn heavy to drag around, so you leave it at home and don't have it when you really wish you did.

Perhaps more seriously, it would be interesting to do a study where you put the very same lenses in front of film and a full-frame digital sensor, run the film through some super-duper scanner, and then make your comparison. The assertion, for example, that bokeh is different is easily testable.