twelveish wrote:
Thanks to everyone contributing to this thread, much appreciated. If anyone reading this have any experience with Olympus OM lenses on the Nex-7 and can give some input on corner performance and/or balance and handling with the Nex-7 body I'd be most grateful. Particularly the OM 21/3.5, 24/2 and 24/2.8 would interest me.
The OM 24/2 was my primary lens on the 5N. It's got a lot going for it, but it's got its flaws. For land/cityscape shooting, it's wonderful. Far more flare resistant that it's multi-coated f/2.8 sibling. Below f/5.6, the extreme corners are just okay. Center frame sharpness starts at very good wide open and improves nicely stopped down. Nice colors but light saturation and contrast. Smooth bokeh for a relatively fast 35mm equivalent. CA's easy enough to correct. Under two meters, the corners are mushy wide open and don't really get acceptable until 5.6, and barrel distortion is noticeable, but it's center frame sharpness working close is very good and the draw can be very pleasing, if a bit "old-school," for lack of a better phrasing. All of this remained true when I put the lens on the NEX-7. The increased resolution has not been detrimental to the lens's performance, but I do have my copy up for sale now. I greatly prefer the draw of my Leica Elmarit-R 24/2.8, and the increased size and different handling of the 7 allows for more comfortable shooting with the larger lens. Otherwise, I would've stuck with the smaller, lighter Oly.
I'm not very disciplined when it comes to lens tests and I really appreciate those of you who are. Having said that, I find myself looking for a building with a large white stucco wall to test all my lenses 35 and wider on my NEX 7.
I'm posting this pic because I haven't seen many taken with the NEX 7 + ZM 35/2.8. This was taken at F5.6 and I was surprised to see color shifting in the upper corners which seems to be more noticeable to me with my Prophoto RGB tiff file as compared to this sRGB jpeg.
douglasf13 wrote:
Yeah, color shift seems pretty noticeable with both ZM 35s on my Nex-7. My cv 35/1.4, G 35 and G 45 seem ok.
Yes, I just got a K mount to NEX adapter and I think I'm probably going to start using my Pentax 31/1.8 as my normal lens on my NEX 7. Even with the adapter, I don't think it's much larger than the CV 35/1.2 and I prefer the slightly wider FOV for a normal lens on APS-C.
Yeah, I'm more limited because I think the CV 35/1.2 is way too big for my uses, generally. I'll likely be switching between the G 35 and 45 on the 7. The G 35 is essentially the same design as the 35 Summicron IV, and the G 45 is a more modern rendering lens, so the 2 cover most anything I'd shoot.
douglasf13 wrote:
Yeah, color shift seems pretty noticeable with both ZM 35s on my Nex-7. My cv 35/1.4, G 35 and G 45 seem ok.
interesting that the CV 35/1.4 shows no color shifts. I get terrible color cast with the NEX7 and CV 35/2.5 on the right side, even when stopped down. Interestingly, my 35Lux ASPH works fine with the NEX 7.
joe88 wrote:
interesting that the CV 35/1.4 shows no color shifts. I get terrible color cast with the NEX7 and CV 35/2.5 on the right side, even when stopped down. Interestingly, my 35Lux ASPH works fine with the NEX 7.
The CV 35/1.4 has the least color shift of any 35mm rangefinder lens that I've used, on the 5N or the 7 (haven't tried the 35/1.2) Unfortunately, the 35/1.4 also has some of the worse corners at any aperture, with field curvature even at f8.
FWIW, I have seen color shift with 35 Lux shots on the 7, but it is likely not noticeable most of the time.
I was just playing around with my new NEX-7 and G 45 the other day, and I can't believe the detail out of this combo. Check out this hilarious bird shot that I inadvertently shot the other day when I was just testing focus.
I was reading the D800 Preview and the author was describing the same experiences heard about NEX 5N and 7 resolution.
Talking about fringing, "At f/2.5 there's plenty of detail but things are a little hazy and fringing is very obvious around high-contrast edges. Critical image quality improves on stopping down, until by f/8 sharpness is high, there's a lot of detail and only a little residual fringing."
And focus, "If, like me, you like to shoot 'wide open' you'll find that the D800's 36.3 million pixels are very unforgiving of even minor focussing errors, something that habitual 12MP shooters will just have to get used to. The D800's high-resolution sensor really does demand a medium-format level of attention to focus accuracy, and for critical work, I'd strongly recommend use live view mode and focussing manually."
A full frame of NEX-7 pixels works out to be about 55 Mpixels.
Yep, it's the Contax G kit lens. Agreed about the number of aperture blades, but I figure, my Hasselblad 80mm has even less blades, so it could be worse!
I'm really starting to warm to shooting this slightly longer focal length as my standard lens. One nice thing about it is that, with lenses around this focal length, the NEX-7's EVF is just about at life size, so it makes bringing the camera up to my eye and framing very natural for everyday use.
The Contax G 35 has a nice rendering, is small, and is a little wider, but, man, this G 45 is nearly a perfect lens, at least technically. I'm liking it combined with the NEX-7, so far.
I have a few G35 white frame tests on page 1 of this thread. Totally clean. Thw ZM 35 OTOH has noticeable purple corners. I'm very happy with the G 35 overall...
Oh yeah, I forgot those shots were already in this thread. The corner sharpness of the G 35 isn't the best, unfortunately, but at least there isn't any shift. As you mention, both my ZM 35s show quite a bit of shift, and even the ZM 50 Sonnar does a bit.
I wasn't sure where to post these, but I figured this thread was as good a place as any - even though I think the original intent was to test M mount wide angles for corner shift and smearing.
Anyway, I'm really liking being able to compare different mount lenses on the same camera. I do these for my own benefit and curiosity, but thought others may be interested.
I wanted to compare the rendering of a couple of my lenses that I can use for portraits on my Nex 7: my pretty recently acquired M mount CV 75/2.5; and my old faithful Pentax 77/1.8 Limited. Two of the following shots were taken with the CV 75 and two with the Pentax 77. See if you can tell which is which and if you're inclined, let me know which lens's rendering you prefer.
Since the max aperture is so different on the two lenses, I didn't compare them wide open. All 4 photos were taken at F 2.8, which would be a pretty normal aperture for me to use in this type of situation with these focal lengths.
If you're curious about the shooting or processing: the two shots in portrait orientation were taken at ISO 100 with a shutter speed around 125 and the two shots in landscape orientation were taken as ISO 200 with a 200-250 shutter speed. I took a number of photos and tried to select for comparison photos from each lens with as similar a perspective as I could obtain with photos where the focus on the eyes was very sharp, but to be honest using focus peaking without magnified view, the eyes were very sharp on 90% of the shots when when viewed at 67% and on about 60% at 100% view. All photos were converted in Capture One 6 with default rendering and the only adjustments I made were to add positive exposure comp. of about .2 to both of the Pentax shots to equalize the exposure to my eye and a slight tint adjustment to the white balance on all four shots because they all had a very slight green tint on my monitor. No contrast or other tonal adjustments were made. I converted into unsharpened Prophoto RGB Tiffs and ran them through the Photokit Sharpener 2 capture sharpening script in Photoshop, resized using bicubic sharper, converted to sRGB and saved as jpegs. I'm sure I could have done something better in my comparison or processing (like use a tripod), but I did the best I could.
Here are the photos, I'll post which were from the Pentax and which were from the CV in the morning.
waiting for my G adapter then I'm done buying adapters.