Comment by dofm
7 hours ago
> Polygonal aperture openings are not the cause of soap-bubble bokeh
Errr, quite obviously not, indeed. But then I didn't say they were?
I said all phone lenses tend to have soap bubble bokeh as a consequence of their optics. Almost all phone lenses don't have mechanical apertures; they have fixed ring apertures and also tiny aspheric lenses.
(In the industry it's seemingly called "onion ring bokeh" to distinguish from soap bubble, presumably because it has more than one ring.)
However! The first stop down of a mechanical iris has a tendency to have odd effects on the lens's bokeh.
You get an interference of the aperture blades and the wide-open bokeh. With a lens that is prone to ring bokeh, slightly stopping down will smear the edge of the bubble, but in this case it is also clearly boosting contrast as you expect (and an irregular shape at different angles)
> But then I didn't say they were?
Is that a question?
Thanks for asking, NuclearPM. It was not actually a question. In informal English a question mark can follow a plain statement, where then it indicates a non-specific uncertainty. In the case above, the sentence could be interpreted generally as: “I didn’t say they were... and I'm not sure what gave impression I did" or "I didn't say they were... I think you misinterpreted."
Does that make sense?
I fucking love how the fact that English is totally, totally, literally non prescriptive breaks engineering type people’s brains.
Perfectly fine use of colloquial commenting?
Yes.
Against the ‘rule’ you were taught in primary school English? Also yes.
That’s why English is so interesting.