@Krisky can see you, but he is gagged, so he can’t respond to you, so I will answer your comment with some comments from him @Mark_Segal:
The 60mm Elmarit has practically no vignetting and performs extremely well overall. However, it’s a lens he primarily uses with film on a Leica R8 and R6, and it’s arguably outside the intended scope of the lens, considering it’s a 1:2 macro lens. It remains one of the sharpest lenses available and can rival the quality of many modern optics in several respects. Still, the lens has limitations—its coating is dated, and he’s uncertain about field curvature and other subtle characteristics. That said, after closely examining his scans, he sees exceptional sharpness at APS-C crop and mid-frame on full-frame, though performance deteriorates toward the edges. Even that has improved after securing the adapter more effectively, thanks to some excellent tips from Harry.
As for monochrome sensors, the claims made against them are factually incorrect. He has tested a monochrome sensor against standard Bayer sensors and found it to be superior in image quality. Demosaicing introduces significant degradation at the pixel level. A monochrome sensor image interpolates far more smoothly than an image from a Bayer sensor—whether printed via offset, LightJet, or inkjet, and at any size—because there’s no interpolation required at all. The logic here is similar to that behind Foveon sensors, although Foveon suffers from inherently higher noise due to its three-layer design (e.g., ISO 100 effectively becomes ISO 400). This issue is absent in monochrome sensors. Nonetheless, even Foveon sensors produce better results than Bayer sensors at base ISO for large prints—for example, 20MP images from his Sigma DP3 Quattro rival those from his 42.4MP Sony A7RII and the 37MP medium format Leica S2.
The monochrome sensor also renders grain more faithfully to the original negative. This has been confirmed by comparing the results to Imacon Flextight scans, as well as to scans he made using the same equipment prior to the monochrome conversion. He has also compared these with baryta darkroom prints made using a Leitz Focomat enlarger.
The good news is that camera scanning with a monochrome sensor, combined with the capabilities of Negative Lab Pro, is not only matching but even surpassing the quality of darkroom prints—especially in terms of dynamic range, rendition of the silver in pushed Tri-X film, and overall aesthetic character. The process is also far more inspiring and closely mirrors the logic and hands-on mechanics of traditional darkroom work, which elevates the entire workflow and ultimately impacts the final result on an aesthetic level.
The benefits of monochrome conversion are well established. While the improvements may not seem dramatic to everyone, they are very real: dynamic range is significantly increased, the sensor becomes markedly more light-sensitive, and both sharpness and resolution are notably enhanced. It also stays truer to the character of black and white film, rendering silver more realistically—and when used in real-world conditions, especially at high ISOs, the results are almost indistinguishable from traditional black and white film.There is no doubt about it.
Now, over to full frame and crop frame: When pixels per inch consist of “poor pixels”—for instance, due to the extremely shallow depth of field at 1:1 magnification, or because the lens resolves less detail at the edges than in the center—then using fewer but optically superior pixels might yield a better reproduction overall.
What he’s questioning is this: perhaps 1:2 reproduction on APS-C is equal to—or even better than—1:1 reproduction at twice the megapixels. Why? Because it uses only the sharpest part of the lens, avoids vignetting (there’s none on the Elmarit, while the Sigma Art reportedly suffers quite a bit), and allows for greater depth of field without stopping down so much that diffraction becomes an issue.
He’s looking forward to testing the new Sigma 70mm at 1:1 full-frame against the Leica Elmarit at 1:2 on both APS-C and full-frame (though he’s nearly given up on using the full frame with the Elmarit, since the entire frame is only acceptably sharp at f/13—and even then, diffraction begins to reduce sharpness in the mid-frame). He plans to share the results here for everyone to see.
As for printing, the book will be small in physical format, but the content is deeply meaningful. He has already invested $30,000 into the project, with another $20,000 allocated for printing.It’s a gut-wrenching undertaking. That’s why he feels so frustrated about being silenced here—because the contributions from this community, along with the capabilities of Negative Lab Pro, have breathed new life into these negatives. And with that, the future of the entire project has been revived—after he had nearly given up following the disappointing results from Flextight scans. And that’s saying something, considering he’s been using that scanner professionally since the early 2000s. Flextight always had problems with dynamic range, but it’s quite shocking to see how superior camera scanning with Negative Lab Pro is to Flextight in rendering high contrast black and white negatives.