I wanted to compare the wonderful Nikon 85mm f1.8 to the almost 30 YO Minolta 70-210 f4.0 'Beercan' in this very artificial setting.
Mounting these lenses on the Nikon D3X and its sensor cousin, the Sony a850, seems like a fair comparison.

This is a small composite portion of test images from these two 24 MP cameras. The top of the image is a severe crop at 100%. The bottom is an enlarged detail of the detail.
The zoom EXIF reports 90mm but that was as close as I could get to the field of view of the 85mm prime. See previous image.

The Nikon was exposed at ISO 200...tungsten balanced and the Sony at ISO 160 at 3300K. In ACR I turned off default sharpening and white balanced the 'paper white' on both images.
On the Sony, I adjusted exposure to match the 'paper white' on the Nikon and then adjusted the black level to also mimic the Nikon...effectively normalizing the two images.

In Photoshop, I aggressively sharpened the Nikon and then tried to duplicate that look with Sony by using even more aggressive sharpening settings. (USM 200, 0.4, 3 vs. 230, 0.4, 4)

The results are interesting to me in that the old a-mount Minolta zoom holds up well to a current Nikon prime that many would consider a benchmark lens. The differences are interesting.
While sharpness and resolution in this case give only a slight nod to the Nikon, this lens with clearly newer and more sophisticated optical coatings and formula (not to mention its a prime) has MUCH, MUCH better micro-contrast.
I see an anomaly on the screen at 100% but can not really perceive WHAT it actually is. Resampled using nearest neighbor to 1000%, it becomes very obvious what is happening.

Another point is my choice of f8.0. I consider the Beercan to be very good wide open at f4.0 and excellent stopped down a bit. I've been told by the owner THE Nikon is already past its prime (pun intended) by f8. The Beercan might be too.