This week I have been heavily working on keeping our lens database up to date. With so many lens announcements coming out from different manufacturers, keeping the database current has been a challenge, since it takes quite a bit of time to add all the relevant information. Big thanks to everyone who has been sending feedback, requests and recommendations to improve our lens database. We want to make it the best and the most complete database in the world and everything we build today will be hugely beneficial for current and future readers of the site. This is why we need your help today! By letting us know about the missing lenses, errors and inconsistencies, you will be joining our efforts in compiling a great source of public information. But before that, let me first shed some light on some of the changes that we have made to the database.
First, we have changed the order of the way the lenses are displayed on the main page. Instead of defaulting to focal length (which basically always showed teleconverters on the first page), we are now sorting lenses by their release date. This is a much better approach, because it allows viewing lenses by their release timeline (although release dates for most lenses should be fairly accurate, finding release dates for older lenses is certainly a challenge).
Second, a lot of lens technology descriptions have been updated to brand-specific verbiage. Unfortunately, this is the area that can be a bit confusing to interpret and intimidating to understand for many of us, since the same things are called differently depending on what brand you are looking at. For example, Nikon calls its image stabilization technology in lenses “Vibration Reduction”, Canon calls the same thing “Image Stabilizer”, while Tamron calls it “Vibration Compensation”. We can see the same pattern of such proprietary terms in many areas, including autofocus motors, lens coatings, lens elements, etc. To make it easier to understand such terms, we have provided extra descriptions in some areas (for example, Nikon’s “Vibration Compensation” is described as “Vibration Compensation (Image Stabilization)”), while generalizing terminologies in others.
Lastly, we have added quite a few of new and missing lenses to the database. At this time we have a total of 935 published lenses in the database and with a bit more effort, we will be adding many more lenses soon. Our goal is to get the last 15 years of lens making accurate first. Once that’s done, we will start adding more legacy lenses into the database.
How You Can Help
Now let’s talk about how you can help. If you could just go over the lenses you own, find them in the database and verify the accuracy of the information, it would help us immensely! If there is an error, please leave a comment below, indicating which lens has issues, or better yet, navigate to the lens page itself and leave a comment there. And if you have lenses that are currently not in the database, it would be very helpful if you could send us the missing information (you can go over a sample lens to see what kind of information we are generally looking for). If it is a lens released in the last 15 years, please just let us know what’s missing and we will take care of it. If it is a very old lens and there is not much information about it from the manufacturer, then we would appreciate it if you could send us detailed information about that lens. You can send all this information via our Contact Us form.
Thank you in advance for your help!
P.S. During the next two weeks I will be heavily working on reviewing some of the latest lenses from Nikon, Sigma, Zeiss and other manufacturers. My current priorities are: Nikon 24mm f/1.8, Nikon 24-70mm f/2.8E VR and Nikon 200-500mm VR. In between I will try to squeeze in reviews of some other camera and non-camera gear.
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from Photography Life https://photographylife.com/updates-on-the-lens-database
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