We have been working hard on building the lens database during the last few weeks, so I would like to apologize for not being able to provide updates, reviews and new articles on the site. We want to make the lens database as comprehensive and as useful as possible for our readers, which is why we have been putting a lot of our effort into it. Thanks to your valuable feedback from our announcement, we have made significant changes to the database and added a few great features:

1. We added close to 100 new lenses to the database (Leica, Samyang, Kenko, Voigtlander, Zeiss)
2. We now have a separate rating for infrared performance of many brand and third party lenses (Nikon, Canon, Sigma, Olympus, Panasonic, Tamron, Tokina and Zeiss). When looking at most of these lenses, you will now see a separate line that says “Infrared Rating”. For now, we only have three rating categories: Good, Mixed and Poor. We might expand on this in the future, if we start testing for IR performance of lenses. Big thanks to Bob Vishneski for this idea. Many of the lens ratings are based on Bob’s feedback and research.
3. The main “Lens Database” page now has some filtering options. You can filter lenses by Brand, Mount, Lens Type, Format, Price, Title, Focal Length and Release Date. We do not have advanced search capabilities yet, but that will be coming soon.
4. Lenses are now listed by focal length instead of title.
5. We created a comprehensive “Lens Index” that shows a listing of all lenses in the database.
6. Our lens reviews have not been fully integrated into the database yet, but a number of lenses have been changed with sample images and our rating. Once we complete this, we will enable the feature to sort by lens rating.
7. We had some issues with data on a number of lenses. Thanks to your feedback, we were able to fix them all.

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We have been incredibly busy during the last few months, working on building our very own Lens Database. As of today, the database contains 400 lenses and we are continuously working on adding more lenses from different manufacturers. You might be wondering about why there is a need to have our own database at Photography Life, when there are plenty of them on the Internet. After I went through a dozen different sites about a year ago, I realized that most sites contain very little information about lenses. While manufacturer specifications are mostly there, such important data as lens construction and MTF charts is typically missing. On top of that, very few sites provide image samples from lenses – images are often too small to look at even on a mobile device.

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