Voigtländer announced a new 21mm f/1.8 Ultron lens for M mount. The price is 1150 EUR. Shipping is expected in early 2013.
Features:
13 elements in 11 groups with aspherical lens
Full metal barrel with high stiffness and durability
Manual focus only but smoothly and perfectly focusing
10 aperture blades brings you a beautiful bokeh
Interesting lens. Depending on how it performs, and its size, it may be an interesting lens for APS-C too
Wow, that could be very nice. It looks smaller than the 35/1.2 . . . so in the 300-400g range perhaps.
IME with CV's fast lenses I think we can expect sharpness to be OK but not great, and there will be some coma issues wide-open. But still that's a cool lens.
Wow, this surprised me when I read it. If it's in-line with the 35 f/1.2's IQ, it should be a very nice lens... It's already got me questioning if it will be justifiable to keep the 21 Lux...
One thing though, as an owner of the CV75 f/1.8, a lens where f/1.8 is are essentially identical to f/2, rather than 1/3 stop brighter, I can't help but wonder if this lens is really 'just' an f/2 in practice.
(I should say I do think the size is just fine given the specs - however I got thrown by the preview image, for some reason it looked smaller so I got my hopes up )
Somehow I don't think the designer of these lenses had size or weight in mind... like, at all. I think he (they?) were concerned with things like precision, durability, optical performance, MF operation & handling, balance with the intended bodies, and so on. If it's light-weight-ness a person is after they can buy the GF5 with the power zoom . Likewise I guess you'll not see too many people shooting the Voigtlander lenses on the GF5 or the alike.
Jacob D wrote:
Could be an interesting option for NEX users, depending on how the sensor handles it.
Most likely regular rangefinder lens. So ok-ish on NEX-5N and F3 (and new NEX-6) and much less on NEX-7. I dont think they can design 21mm lens at this size/weight without being similar to other rangefinder wide-angles.
Received my copy of the lens yesterday. Plan to do some tests with it this week on the M9 and probably also the GXR against the Leica 21/1.4, Zeiss ZM 21/2.8 and Leica SEM 21/3.4:
From the GXR tests I did today, it performs quite nicely and is very good corner to corner by f/4, so it might be promising on a NEX. The 21 Lux beats it for central sharpness but it's quite bad on the GXR in the mid zone to edges area until about f/11 when it catches up to the CV. The reason for this is the Lux has a huge mid zone resolution dip that is quite obvious on FF. This dip happens to line up with the edge zone of APS-C. I suspect it's a consequence of Leica wanting to 'flatten' the plane of focus. On FF, wide open, the Lux is sharp in the centre and at the edges along a flat plane. The CV appears to have fairly strong field curvature, with focus falling behind the subject distance towards the edges. Therefore 'brick wall' shots will have soft edges until stopped down a bit. The best of the bunch though, on the GXR and FF, is the 21 SEM, if you want the closest to edge to edge perfection. These impressions are based primarily on 'landscape' type scenes where the focus was either at infinity or beyond 20m. I plan to do more close range tests in the next day or so, which is probably a more realistic application for this lens if one intends to use it for subject isolation.
Ron - we both asked about a NEX 7 because of the difference in sensor it struggles with purple corners with wide angle rangefinder lenses, thats why many are wondering how it would perform on a NEX 7.Likely it will do well on the 5,6 NEX.
-Jim
It cant be small. Tho 412g is quite lightweight for such lens. Guess vignetting will be pretty strong..
. Likewise I guess you'll not see too many people shooting the Voigtlander lenses on the GF5 or the alike.