I asked this on the book of face, but I've got a lens design question. I tried a bit of google fu, but didn't easily find an answer, I got a lot of links about the difference between bokeh and depth of field and a couple about apodization (sp?). A question for people who know about lens design.... The bokeh (quality not DoF) of a lens is greatly affected by the shape of aperture blades. Similarly diffraction limiting of resolution is affected by the edge of the aperture blades. What if rather than making the aperture blades out of an opaque material they were made out of a clear, or translucent material, and were plated with an opaque material, and rather than a sharp edge, the opaqueness faded out near the edge? This would give much softer edges to the bokeh, though it would limit the minimum aperture -- Larry Colen lrc@red4est.com sent from ret13est

Larry Colen wrote: >The bokeh (quality not DoF) of a lens is greatly affected by the shape of aperture blades. As far as I know this is not true. From what I've read, bokeh is largely determined by the degree to which the sagittal and tangential MTF curves follow each other. The notion of "shape of the aperture blades" affecting bokeh comes from the marketing department of lens makers (who frequently try to pass off specular highlights as "bokeh").