When we planned the redesign of our Burbank facility, we set out to upgrade our rental department with the most state-of-the-art and efficient rental bays we could imagine. A large part of this was introducing a completely redesigned resolution chart specifically designed to meet the more stringent demands of today's 4K digital cinema cameras and lenses.

In the last few years, MTF has become a buzzword in both cine and HD lens circles, but there is still a lot of confusion about just what it is, what it can and can't do, and what it means to the cinematographer in a practical sense. In this article, I will attempt to clear up some this confusion by explaining what MTF means from a technical standpoint.