Moonlight savings time: Machine Vision Lens Comparison: Focal length range 23 mm to 25 mm. From Schneider, Ricoh Pentax, Tamron, Edmund Optics and Fujinon

I typically use Fujinon HF sereis lenses. They are good quality construction and cost under $150 new. I don't have any complaints, but how do they compare to the rest of lens manufacture's products? There are more expensive lenses, such as the Schneider Xenoplan at $900+. What does that extra money get you? There are some new designs, such as the Edmund Optics C series and UC series. Do the new lens designs learn from and improve on the old designs? Is there a better lens than that I use? To answer that I tested lens performance with two targets.

To measure distortion I used a dot grid and LabView to calculate lens distortion.

To measure sharpness I used a star target. The maximum edge strength vs line pair per mm is used to compare the center to the edges.

http://stores.ebay.com/vitamall

The targets can be purchased from the ebay store Vitamall

ebay is a great place to get used test equipment on the cheap. All the lenses were from my old stock, or purchased for this test on ebay.

The same camera was used for all tests.
Camera: JAI BM-500GE 2/3" CCD 3.45 um pixels 2456 x 2048

All Lenses were tested at F/4.0

*Note: Bottom Right lighting had a problem. The contrast was low on all bottom right star target inspections. It is represented as the cyan curve in the graph. This was an error I failed to correct for.

Edmund Optics 25 mm/F1.4 59871