Chromatic Aberrations ~ new vs old lenses

I'm not sure how it came to me, but I had a question of how chromatic aberrations might effect the appearance of "sharpness" in an image and took five lenses of relatively different vintages to have a look.

Software automation can correct for various optical "defects", including field distortion, chromatic aberrations (CA), and "sharpness."  As a first step for my comparison I would need to turn all of that off to note what just the lens was doing.

You see, I had the sneaking suspicion that modern lenses were being tweaked into fabulous goodness by lens correction profile, or .lcp, files that are often hidden from a user during RAW image processing, but I wasn't sure.  I'd heard over the years many marketing claims as to new lens design technologies improving all manner of traditional optical defects, so maybe the .lcp files weren't doing as much as I thought?

The lenses on hand included:

• Nikon Nikkor 24mm f/2.8 Ai
• Pentax-M 28mm f/2.8
• Sigma 19mm f/2.8 EX DN E
• Sigma 24mm f/3.5 i-Contemporary
• Takumar 28mm f/3.5 SMC (second version)

Using a Sony A6300 set on a tripod, +1EV (because of the strong white back-light), 2 second self timer, ISO100, focusing on the stick, then processed in RawTherapee using only the demosaic and Camera Standard tone-curve enabled color management steps (to keep software processing to an absolute minimum).  

Voila! a mundane scene of my Rescue Orchid - 

 

There were a few surprises awaiting me.  Looking for chromatic aberration, here's what I found  -

Comments -

The Sigma 24mm f/3.5 shows the strongest chromatic aberrations of the five lenses I looked at whereas the old Pentax-M and older Takumar 28mm lenses show the best CA corrections.  Even the Nikkor 25mm appears to show less CA than the Sigma 24mm and is perhaps better at CA correction than the Sigma 19mm f/2.8 APS-C.

Looking at how CA effects the sense of "sharpness" I see that, yes, indeed, images look less "sharp" when CA is stronger.  Makes me wonder how much modern lenses rely on software intervention to make them look as good as they do?