Comparison 55mm vs 3 stacked diopters

[clockdoc]

Hi all,
Per Wulf's suggestion of comparing equal sized images to determine if it is better to simply enlarge a portion of the original unaided image, here are two. The first is a cropped portion of the initial shot using the 55mm focal length of the Nikon 18-55mm kit lens with no added diopters.



This is a cropped portion of the image created with the three stacked diopters (+3+2+1). Comments? Does it appear worth it to screw three additional lenses onto your base lens or just crop from the original shot on the 10.2MP Nikon D80? Also bear in mind there could be manual focus errors that would affect comparison shots.

[Jamesc359]

Hands down you're a lot better off with the cropped version. The color is a heck of a lot better and the chromatic aberrations are negligible. The stacked diopter version is a complete 180º. The color is washed out and the aberrations are horrific.

If resolution is a concern, maybe a single diopter with a little cropping would be an acceptable solution?

[wulf]

In this example, cropping definitely wins. It may depend on the diopters but it looks like these ones don't work brilliantly (although it may be possible tweak the camera settings a bit to get slightly better results as the second one does look a touch overexposed).

Wulf