I received my Zeiss 35 ZE yesterday and compared it to my excellent copy of Canon 35L.
This is not scientific. I just took both lenses to the beach today and took some
similar shots with both. Wanted to see if what I felt was true.
It's more about the "look" and feel rather than anything serious about the sharpness etc.
A couple of shots - Zeiss 35 ZE f2 wide open and Canon 35L at f2. Same settings.
Unfair right? Canon should be crushing Zeiss at f2. Judge for yourself.
Corner crops included. Open in Adobe RAW. I tried to make the shot look good.
IMO Zeiss just looks so much more dramatic, 3-dimensional. The rendering is much
more film like. And the sharpens and CA of the crop is better.
I wouldn't get too excited about this. The Canon shot is more than half a stop overexposed in comparison to the Zeiss image. Who knows about critical focus. Both excellent lenses.
Well, Andrew, I told you that you would get rid of your 35L, didn't I? The same happened to me, and I didn't even have a ZE35, only a ZE 50, but, when you like the Zeiss rendition, 35L doesn't do it for you anymore.
I found that, to make a 35L pic look more like the very same (not in a controlled, scientific way, as there was a FL difference) pic out of my Zeiss, I needed to push contrast and saturation in each picture.
Congratulations on your ZE 35.
Regarding the exposure difference, maybe the light got brighter... but it's also possible that the ZE @ f/2 is somewhat darker than the 35L @ f/2 because it's wide open where it will suffer the most from vignetting and the 35L is stopped down one stop. As an owner of the EF 35 f/2, I can say that stopping it down one stop makes a considerable difference in image brightness (it appears to be about a 1/2 stop darker @ f/2).
This is interesting to see... But for me, instead of adding a set of ZE lenses to somewhat duplicate my current selection of EF lenses, I'm more and more tempted to get an M9 and a bunch of ZMs, assuming they will perform similarly to the ZE/ZFs...
Ron, to the best of my knowledge, ZMs are different from ZE/ZFs. For example, the 21 is a Biogon and not a Distagon, the 85 is a Tessar or a Sonnar and not a Planar. There are also different choices in apertures and focal lengths. This doesnt mean that they are better or worse, just that you shouldn't buy strictly based on the ZE/ZF performance of a given lens. Hope this helps.
Emile Gregoire wrote:
That's a remarkable difference... the 35L looks kind of flat and dull in comparison.
That was exactly my reaction.
Useless for some, for me the goal of that little exercise was achieved.
I'm going through all my test shots and every time I'm showing two pictures - 35 ZE and 35L,
everybody picks up the Zeiss shot right away. There is just something making them so
much more pleasing.
philber wrote:
I found that, to make a 35L pic look more like the very same (not in a controlled, scientific way, as there was a FL difference) pic out of my Zeiss, I needed to push contrast and saturation in each picture.
interesting topic, possibly not optimal subject matter to demonstrate the point. could we have a picture of something besides grass (where were the focus points? with so many little targets on different planes, it's hard to tell), with a definite focal plane/subject established? (maybe something artistic, like a cat, or some staggered batteries, or a cat sniffing some staggered batteries?)
That canon 35 looks softer than my canon 50 1.4 at f/2.
Btw, the lighting changing like that renders this test worthless because it flattens the canon shot significantly. The lighting is contrasty in the zeiss and overpowering in the canon.
Nick Baker wrote:
Btw, the lighting changing like that renders this test worthless because it flattens the canon shot significantly. The lighting is contrasty in the zeiss and overpowering in the canon.
Not true, it's the same lighting, Canon shot was taken one minute later, the same angle,
same exposure, same everything.
The difference is exactly the subject of the exercise - it's how Canon renders the image
comparing to Zeiss.
I had the same type of comparison with my Zeiss and 35L. I still have some shots to show it somewhere, I think. Snowboarder's example is typical, as far as I am concerned.
Not suprising to me.
I use the lens often as I like the frames that 35mm focal length gives. But I always felt that the sharpness was overrated. The sharpness doesn't come out until f/4 or so. http://www.sesee.com/Photo/Exports/MTF-wide-mid.jpg
