philber wrote:
Sebboh, look at bobu's work. He definitely preferred his 18mm to his 21mm Leica, even though the 21 was a bete rlens and supported filters. Hourses for courses...
yeah, it's a matter of taste and personal preference i suppose. bobu takes wonderful pictures, but i typically like his 50mm shots much better than his 18mm or 21mm shots. i just find that perspective mostly distasteful, other people love that look. i think it's similar to the bokeh craze – some people really enjoy looking at pictures that are all or mostly bokeh and others just think an image where most of the frame is oof is a wasted frame.
'i realise this is just my own personal preference.'
glad you added that one mate, lol.
I have sympathy for your opinion (and Mike's), for years I felt 28mm was about the limit of good taste, but the near-far and shock value combined with the ability to just getting in a stack of connected detail won me over...that plus what emerges from the 21mm Distagon. My interiors are in creepy places western people don't ever see, but I take your point about all the cheesy 'spacious living room' real estate P&S photos.
philip_pj wrote:
'i realise this is just my own personal preference.'
glad you added that one mate, lol.
I have sympathy for your opinion (and Mike's), for years I felt 28mm was about the limit of good taste, but the near-far and shock value combined with the ability to just getting in a stack of connected detail won me over...that plus what emerges from the 21mm Distagon. My interiors are in creepy places western people don't ever see, but I take your point about all the cheesy 'spacious living room' real estate P&S photos.
yeah, my point to Roger that kinda got kinda lost amongst my personal preference was really just that shooting an 18mm is hard. especially if you don't do it regularly. it's hard to take a well composed and interesting shot with a super telephoto or even more so with a super wide angle lens if you haven't spent a lot of time working with those types of lenses. they're a perspective that we humans aren't used to seeing.
edit: they're also very difficult to design lenses with a different bar for high performance.
People do seem to get pretty obsessed with the idea that landscapes must be shot using the widest angle lens possible. I enjoy the perspective, but it is certainly difficult to do it well and can become a gimmick when done poorly. I know a few people who think the wider the lens an image is shot with, the better. Any time you turn your brain off like that and put your photography on autopilot, it's a bad sign.
Are any Fuji shooters planning to pick up one of these lenses? I'm particularly interested in seeing some comparisons to the 35mm.
A lot of Mamiya 7 users found the 43mm too extreme also (it's about 22mm eq. from memory), and Mamiya belatedly released the 50mm as the last regular lens made for the system. 6x6 seems to work better for many people using ultra wides.
But yes, the wide lenses dominated the Mamiya 7 system (43mm, 50mm, 65mm and 80mm) and had a very special look to them - ultra clinical but oh so sharp, all of them. Funny, the rear element was about as close to the film plane as we see in the RX1, so much so you had to inspect rear elements carefully when buying a used lens. Most of us could never afford them new. Great build quality.
itai195 wrote:
Are any Fuji shooters planning to pick up one of these lenses? I'm particularly interested in seeing some comparisons to the 35mm.
I'm really curious about this too. It's probably been mentioned at least a couple times (once on the third post alone), but I haven't read through all 30+ pages. Fuji already has the 14 and 35, which sound excellent from a quick scan. I really wonder how the Zeiss will compete.
The 32/1.8 reminds me of the ZM50 Planar. There seems to be a familiar quality shared by the two, despite the focal length difference. And the look of the 12 certainly reminds me of my ZM21/2.8.
As for the marketing campaign... It would seem no company can win at this one. Everyone bashes Canon for their boring, amateurish samples. Nikon seems to do somewhat better at this. Anyone remember the Leica Monochrom release with *extremely* moody images by Jacob Aue Sobol? Then the early user images started trickling in and they looked nothing like those, consisting of mostly flat gray mid tones compared to Sobol's high contrast treatment. Subsequently the MM was trashed by uninformed commenters... Then there are the Jean Gaumy Kyrgyzstan images bashed for being too boring and unprocessed... It's as if everyone expects some standard of imagined results straight out of the camera. And of course each person is a bit different.
If Zeiss make the images too good, it may intimidate novice users. They need to find a balance that offers some inspiration without appearing to be unattainable. I don't think they're worried about the alt crowd - the lenses will sink or swim based on user feedback.
Dudewithoutape wrote:
I'm really curious about this too. It's probably been mentioned at least a couple times (once on the third post alone), but I haven't read through all 30+ pages. Fuji already has the 14 and 35, which sound excellent from a quick scan. I really wonder how the Zeiss will compete.
Badly
very hard go past the fuji lenses
philip_pj wrote:
A lot of Mamiya 7 users found the 43mm too extreme also (it's about 22mm eq. from memory), and Mamiya belatedly released the 50mm as the last regular lens made for the system. 6x6 seems to work better for many people using ultra wides.
But yes, the wide lenses dominated the Mamiya 7 system (43mm, 50mm, 65mm and 80mm) and had a very special look to them - ultra clinical but oh so sharp, all of them. Funny, the rear element was about as close to the film plane as we see in the RX1, so much so you had to inspect rear elements carefully when buying a used lens. Most of us could never afford them new. Great build quality. ...Show more →
...and also quite a bother to set up and measure, but believe me - they're sharp. Sharper than anything I can currently think of for medium format, except maybe the AF incarnation of the Mamiya 150/2.8 - that "cheats" by having a relatively simple design layout due to the longer FL. They're just as good as the Leica S-series lenses, in some ways a lot better.
Spyro P. wrote:
Badly
very hard go past the fuji lenses
But it's unfortunately oh so easy to be better than the Fuji bodies and sensor layout... Which kind of sets the pace for sales. The Touit mounts to the NEX system AND the Fuji X, which adds up to about 15-30x more bodies than for the Fuji's alone (although most of these sales includes customers that would never dare change a lens...) .
Ι'm not sure what sets the pace for sales to be honest.
outside the confines of niche communities like this one it seems that the general consensus is that the X-Trans*** sensor is as good or better than anything in the APS-C world. I obviously frequent this niche community here therefore I dont necessarily agree with them.
Also I dont have a breakdown of zeiss's target groups and sales, so I don't know, maybe those niche communities are enough for them to make a buck from still photography lenses.
Those photos in Flickr, especially those in the Bangkok "challenges", do not make me want to buy one. They are more like armature's snapshots than promotional materials to my eyes. And yes, I have been to Bangkok for several times (both for work and for fun) but I do not find those pictures interesting or really representing the attractiveness of Bangkok.
Zeiss effectively and cheaply outsource product promotion to guys like Lloyd and Sean, and other prominent bloggers in the case of the ZM range, plus dpr etc. You could be forgiven for thinking that they would rather simply announce the release of new lenses than actually get their hands dirty on something as tasteless and demeaning as spruiking their output. And good for them for this approach, say I for one.
I have to agree with the complaint about the Bangkok challenge. These images are quite amateurish. I wonder if it's not the intentions or maybe it's just the format of the challenge that lead to snapshot type images. They should let them run loose to take whatever shots they want. They look like they're always together. I also don't think Bangkok is the right city for the challenge. It's a pretty dense city, and the sights and sounds kinda overwhelms the senses. If they wanted to do this in Asia, then Laos, Cambodia, or Myanmar would be my pick. Thailand is one giant tourist trap.
I agree, sflxn, but it is also much easier to organize and support something like this in Bangkok...
As to the pictures themselves, it looks basically like they gave photographers 10 minutes, and a SD card with a capacity of one JPEG shot, and cameras with no LCD. That is the sort of conditions from which I would expect such results.
Philber, I didn't read the objective of the contest, but I wonder if the intent is NOT to show how great the lens is. It seems the intent is more a publicity stunt in the vein of reality show/pop culture/instagram type contest. If that's the intent, they really don't know their market. People into that type of stuff do not buy $900-1200 lenses.
Or maybe they want to draw publicity while drawing attention away from the lens' quality. It's a very strangely put together stunt.
