In article , Floyd L. Davidson says...
Any good optical engineer could work it out, given the
right equipment and a fairly fat check.

That's not a likely route for any but the most serious and
well healed.

I'm wondering if the lens manufacturer could measure the point spread
function for its lenses and provide this information to image processing
applications, so that these could calculate the optimal sharpening
function.

In other words, software would compensate (at least partially) for the
weaknesses of a lens, as it is being done with vignetting or geometric
distortions in cameras.
--
Alfred Molon

Olympus E-series DSLRs and micro 4/3 forum at
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/MyOlympus/
http://myolympus.org/ photo sharing site