Lensbusters.com

 Surprise!  Wide open the much less expensive old Minolta 50mm Macro outperforms Canon's 50mm f2.5 stopped down to f2.8  But wait, there's another twist....look at the out of focus areas in front of the focused areas. Though the Minolta was visibly much better wide open, it has some ugly rendering in this area. Stopped down there's little difference in the sharpness of both lenses. But the weird rendering of the Minolta was something of a disappointment. Though honestly if I wasn't looking at results side-by-side I don't know if I'd care.

Just wanted to let you all know of a fun resource for creative stuff including photo related items..... In Oakland there's a place called the  East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse . There's usually a little bit of photo related sludge in a designated area, but also interspersed throughout the jumbles of  junk   treasures. On my last visit I picked up: a mostly full case (500x) of those  old airmail envelopes   a few dozen sheets of  letraset a bunch of 35mm and 4x5 negative sleeves (ca. 50-100) various laser labels a seemingly unused cable release (for conventional film cameras) a couple of old maps a roll of old Kodachrome (I know I can't develop it!)  multi-colored sheet feed paper for impact printer (dot matrix) and some other miscellany.  Box of Misc Crap in the "Camera Corner" (not really in a corner, and not all cameras) In the end it  all fit in a medium size moving box and cost about $28 out the door. There were a few 35mm SLRs