AhamB wrote:
You say "standard" as if it's intrinsically less valuable than a 90 or 180mm lens.
Well, the 180/2 is about 3x as large and heavy, and full of huge chunks of Leica glass. I don't think standards are intrinsically worth less than a tele, but they are a lot smaller. One would expect the bill of materials to be a lot less.
Having said that, both 180/2 and 90/2AA were more expensive when they were current.
By the way, do we know who will be manufacturing the lens? I haven't seen anything about location of production. Germany, Japan, somewhere else? Cosina makes no mention of it (in contrast to their discussion of Zeiss' ZF/ZE/ZM lenses, which they do make), so I suspect they might not be involved.
Lotusm50 wrote:
By the way, do we know who will be manufacturing the lens? I haven't seen anything about location of production. Germany, Japan, somewhere else? Cosina makes no mention of it (in contrast to their discussion of Zeiss' ZF/ZE/ZM lenses, which they do make), so I suspect they might not be involved.
Considering price, it should be Germany. But dont count on that..
sebboh wrote:
i can think of many times were i wanted to shoot landscape at infinity at f1.4. usually because i didn't have a tripod, but sometimes because i had a tripod, but wanted to get stars without movement. most of these situations i would not have been willing to carry a lens this big and heavy though.
I do see a certain irony with a lens like this that performs so well wide open coming to the market just now when we finally have sensors that perform exceptional at higher ISO's (making a super high performance lens of very fast speed less necessary than perhaps it might have been in the past for some uses). Finding an exceptional F2 lens is not that difficult and we have certainly gained much more than a 1 stop improvement sensor wise over the past few years or so. That's also great because I can think of more instances where the limited dof at 1.4 would cause more issues if it were used mostly to deal with low light situations.
Aehm yea, cause sole reason for existence of fast wide-open sharp abberation free lens is ... low light.
We have sensors capable of really high ISO since D3/D700. That was about five years ago. Even today, only D4/1D-X can be considered as capable of very high ISO (means usable 6400 .. not perfect, but usable). Both have this for quite high price, not only in money, everything is compromise in digital photography (or any) so is high ISO for something.
Yet I dont see any decline in need or lust for high speed lenses. Even if I had camera capable perfectly clean ISO 12800, I would still like to have 50/1.4 lens at least. Obviously decent 50/1.0 or faster is prefered.
Mescalamba wrote:
Aehm yea, cause sole reason for existence of fast wide-open sharp abberation free lens is ... low light.
Who said anything about the sole reason? I specifically specified "some uses" and said so in response to low light use. In the film days, fast lenses were often a necessity as compared to today in such situations. The point still remains that fast lenses are not as necessary as they once might have been FOR SOME USES. We also did not have a Nikon D800 a few years back, which of course not only surpasses the D700 in low light but also offers much higher resolution.
There is also no shortage of users not entirely happy about the heightened attention needed to obtain acceptable focus on high Mp sensors, a matter propelled along by ever sharper fast lenses with very shallow DoF. Lloyd Chambers included, going by his write-up.
So photography devolves into a technically narrow pursuit of some form of perfection in focus acquisition. I made it, that cat's eye is perfect! Too bad the world moves, lol.
We are talking roughly around 5lbs or 2kg+ for lens plus body.
This does not make it exactly a manual focus street lens. A tripod or monopod would be needed. Is it a studio lens? Is it a landscape tripod lens? Is it a portrait lens?
The lens does not have an attachment support, which means all the stress point is on the camera mount....hummmm....how to carry around? It is borderline hazard even on a tripod. Do we hold the camera body or the lens or both
Almass wrote:
I am still perplexed for the use of this lens.
We are talking roughly around 5lbs or 2kg+ for lens plus body.
This does not make it exactly a manual focus street lens. A tripod or monopod would be needed. Is it a studio lens? Is it a landscape tripod lens? Is it a portrait lens?
The lens does not have an attachment support, which means all the stress point is on the camera mount....hummmm....how to carry around? It is borderline hazard even on a tripod. Do we hold the camera body or the lens or both
why does one need a tripod or monopod exactly? this should be easier to handhold than a 135/2 which is plenty easy to handhold in decent light with d800 or one of the 24mp aps-c cameras. no need for extra support let the camera dangle by it's grip from your finger tips as you stroll about town. obviously, you should use two hands to hold when you shoot – it's manual focus after all.
i admit i don't have a use for it, anything i'd use it for i would rather use the 50 lux asph for instead.
Tariq Gibran wrote:
I do see a certain irony with a lens like this that performs so well wide open coming to the market just now when we finally have sensors that perform exceptional at higher ISO's (making a super high performance lens of very fast speed less necessary than perhaps it might have been in the past for some uses). Finding an exceptional F2 lens is not that difficult and we have certainly gained much more than a 1 stop improvement sensor wise over the past few years or so. That's also great because I can think of more instances where the limited dof at 1.4 would cause more issues if it were used mostly to deal with low light situations. ...Show more →
Actually, I am not aware of any great 50/2 lenses for DSLRs? The 50MP isn't one, it has iffy boke and corners.
contas wrote:
I think the Zeiss's price commited a big mistake when deviding the Zeiss Fan Club in to two: who can and the other cannot afford ....the OTUS.
I think this was already the case, now the line just moved. The 50 Planar was quite affordable, especially used, but some of the other lenses are very expensive: 15, 25/2, 35/1.4, 50/2MP, 100/2MP, 135/2.
Zeiss is simply being forced to design lenses higher up the performance curve which they can only achieve by larger/heavier (more elements) costlier designs. Sigma artisan and Canikon have recently improved their performance points higher and they are higher volume designs with AF. Zeiss to compete needs to come up with new designs which clearly perform at a higher level to survive. This new lens line is aimed at this higher performance level which is realized with the newer high MP cameras like D800 (E). Zeiss and Leica can not compete with higher volume guys at their lower performance levels. Video guys will be the main target for this lens I would think. Obviously not average phot ography hobbyist with this 4k price tag.
Almass wrote:
I am still perplexed for the use of this lens.
We are talking roughly around 5lbs or 2kg+ for lens plus body.
This does not make it exactly a manual focus street lens. A tripod or monopod would be needed.
Certainly not. This lens weighs just under 1 kg. I routinely hand hold the Canon 180mm macro lens, which weighs 1 kg, for macro (yes it has a tripod ring). Canon's 85mm f/1.2 weighs just over 1kg and is very popular.
Whenever people say "manual focus" or "50 mm" for some reason the immediate reaction in some quarters is "street". I doubt it was designed for that - if you were going to solve that problem cost no object, the solution would not be an SLR design - and I'm sure there are many other uses for it. Zeiss do name a couple in their promo video.
This lens solves the problems with fast fifties on 35mm SLRs that have meant I would never use them for colour work wide open. Because I rarely work in black and white, I've never given any thought to what could be done with such a lens; I cannot say what I'd use it for, and frankly I have plenty of other photographic things to get on with without buying this toy. But I imagine for a start there will be people out there currently restricting themselves to black and white or investing horrendous amounts of time in post fixing bokeh fringes drooling over this.
melcat wrote:
Certainly not. This lens weighs just under 1 kg. I routinely hand hold the Canon 180mm macro lens, which weighs 1 kg, for macro (yes it has a tripod ring). Canon's 85mm f/1.2 weighs just over 1kg and is very popular.
Whenever people say "manual focus" or "50 mm" for some reason the immediate reaction in some quarters is "street". I doubt it was designed for that - if you were going to solve that problem cost no object, the solution would not be an SLR design - and I'm sure there are many other uses for it. Zeiss do name a couple in their promo video.
This lens solves the problems with fast fifties on 35mm SLRs that have meant I would never use them for colour work wide open. Because I rarely work in black and white, I've never given any thought to what could be done with such a lens; I cannot say what I'd use it for, and frankly I have plenty of other photographic things to get on with without buying this toy. But I imagine for a start there will be people out there currently restricting themselves to black and white or investing horrendous amounts of time in post fixing bokeh fringes drooling over this. ...Show more →
Well, I don't have any answer yet as I did not try the Zeiss Otus yet.
What I will be looking at, is how the weight of the lens is spread and hopefully it is not on the head of the lens away from the camera mount.
Besides the usual Bokeh, CA...etc, I need to check how it handles points of lights in low light and how easy it is to focus and how delicate is fine focussing.
Irrelevant of the above, I need to check what this lens color render will bring to my style of shooting as I already have few 50's lying around.
But dont count on that..