It's interesting to me that Alain's essay dwells so much on technical accuracy, when his finished results are so much about his aesthetic choices - which have only a tangential relationship to what was captured (as is always the case). Art has to do, not with "obtaining the best lenses", but working with whatever tools you use to forge a personal expression. Numerous photographers have made a "feature" of the limitations of their working medium. Grain was the friend of numerous photographers, from Robert Frank to William Klein. Bill Brandt, as one of many others, did a series with a camera whose unique distortion he found engaging. It's a fallacy to assume that I want to make the print to "see what I saw". First of all, as Alain essentially points out, this is impossible, so as a goal it is unreasonable. Secondly, one should remember that the print or projection of an image is a reality that is separate from the reality of what was in front of the lens. The artistic choices that are involved in crafting a print (including the null case where "no"crafting is applied) have to do with making choices regarding cropping, balancing unity with variety, trading off form versus content, etc. This is all within the bounds of personal expression and is indifferent to mimesis. There are many practitioners who feel that "noise" is an important component of artistic endeavor. Take the example of music. When music began to be "invaded" by, first, analog, and then digital technology, musicians recognized the expressive value of noise. In jazz, it manifested itself in the preference for the electromechanical distortions of the Hammond B-3. In the early analog synthesizers, musicians revered the "mistakes" when engineers created circuits that didn't behave according to the specifications. When digital technology cleaned up many of these problems, musicians sought randomization and noise algorithms to return unpredictablity to the output. Bottom line: for many of us, noise is our friend and "tolerable" chaos is healthy.