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Zeiss Distagon 35mm f/2
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Review Date: Jul 10, 2011
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Recommend? yes |
Price paid: Not Indicated
| Rating: 10
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Pros:
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Sharpness (already at large apertures), colors, contrast, rendering, build, smooth focussing ring, great value.
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Cons:
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Minor barrel distortion, lens cap hard to put on (that goes for all Zeiss lenses it seems).
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I love this lens. I mostly use it for night panorama's at f/5.6. It's incredibly sharp already by then and the contrast and colors are superb.
Images speak louder than words. An example of a night panorama I took with this lens @ f/5.6 with my 5D mark II. Around 5,000 * 2,500 pixels.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xavibarca/5924613520/sizes/o/in/photostream/
The lens is almost as sharp as my benchmark Zeiss MakroPlanar 50 2. Which I think is a really strong performance for a 35mm lens.
The minor barrel distortion it exhibits can be fixed in Photoshop in a minimal amount of time.
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Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L II
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Review Date: Oct 1, 2010
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Recommend? yes |
Price paid: Not Indicated
| Rating: 10
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Pros:
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Sharpness, no CA, contrast, no distortion, build.
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Cons:
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Balancing act of stopping down for corners and diffraction. See below.
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A fantastic piece of engineering by Canon. I also own the 17 TS-E and both lenses are fantastic. For an architecture photographer it should be a reason to consider Canon especially paired with a 5D mark II (or 1dsMark III). In my opinion using live view is vital for focussing especially when using tilt.
If there is one minor drawback that I found it's the fact that you need to stop down significantly to get "sharp corners". The corners on the 17 TS-E seem to hold down better. A related quibble is that you seem to lose sharpness when stopping down more than on the 17 TS-E. Therefore I sometimes combine images using the "stopped down version" for the corners only.
Images speak louder than words. You can find a high resolution sample here. Reasonable amount of shift used. Taken at f/10.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xavibarca/5031119973/sizes/o/in/photostream/
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Canon TS-E 17mm f/4L
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Review Date: Mar 16, 2010
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Recommend? yes |
Price paid: Not Indicated
| Rating: 10
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Pros:
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Amazingly wide, hardly any CA, good sharpness acceptable even when fully shifting, very little distortion.
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Cons:
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Does not accept filters. Does not accept a lens hood. With night images lights sometimes cause some minor flaring.
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I love this lens. My only quibble is that I wish I had it earlier. Living in Hong Kong this lens allows me to take architectural images I could only dream of. I already owned Canon lenses. And if I didn't this lens would make me switch to Canon.
Very often I combine different shifts to come to very sharp 40+ Megapixels super high resolution images on my 5D mark II. I have not been using the tilt ability yet.
My flickr stream has many images taken with this lens.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xavibarca/
I also posted 2 slightly higher res samples.
Full shift up:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xavibarca/4423334715/
A pano of two images. Neutral and full upward shift.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xavibarca/4424080792/
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