Samuli Vahonen
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nehemiahphoto wrote:
Samuli, mind to share your thoughts on the ZA 50 1.4 (a-mount)? That's one the very few ZA lenses I haven't shot and have been curious about for years.
This lens is "the latest Planar 50mm" from Zeiss; Loxia is derived from ZM 2/50 and FE "planar" 50mm f/1.4 is actually more like Distagon design (Planar is there just in the name of lens, it looks NOTHING like double gauss what Planar refers to) like all modern large & super performance 50mm lenses. I hoped this lens to be "Contax N 50mm on mount which could be shoot with A7". And it kind of is that, but Zeiss & Sony went too far with internal focusing (only rear groups move when focused) and few asphericals; lens is technically well optimized at price of losing Planar design boke smoothness. Planar (double gauss) design even very much optimized is never going to reach "mathematical perfection" modern large size normal lenses (Sigma 50 Art, Zeiss Otus 55, FE 50mm f/1.4, Canon RF 50mm f/1.2 etc.). Due to all fancy high tech Zeiss&Sony have packed to this lens it's usable from f/1.7-2 depending on scene (ZE/ZF requires f/2.5-2.8 on focus plane to reach same quality), but boke contrast is always higher than old Planars, even closed down to f/5.6-8. Also boke tends to be harsher than older Planar designs.
This lens is awful @ f/1.4 like it's predessors, there is no spherical aberration but focus plane contrast improves a lot closing down f/1.7, and boke is very rough (highlight balls/circles have razor sharp edges wide open). I would assume one goal with asphericals and fancy design is to eliminate spherical aberration to offer accurate AF with SLR-bodies. When I purchased the lens I did many aperture series and did not notice focus shift. This is good because Alpha->FE adapter will only close down for exposure and will otherwise always remain wide open.
Where this lens excels is focus plane, sharper and less aberrations that ZE/ZF 1.4/50, and still maintaining high contrast and microcontrast. And in my eyes it has real Zeiss Planar rendering inside DOF, and I like quite much how it renders landscapes, they don't render flat but landscape can have depth&volume like ZE/ZF 1.4/50 and Loxia 50 (or ZM 2/50).
I had bad luck in 2018 and just as I had purchased Sigma 50 Art in June 2018, I found this lens used for good price (I had been looking for a long time) = I did buy both. Due to this I lost big part of 2018 shooting season by comparing (at least in my mind) these two lenses, instead focusing fully to photography. I hoped very much this lens to be "the 50mm" for me, but it turned out that I like more Sigma Art 50mm for my usual forest scenes. For landscapes this lens is preferred over Sigma, but so are many more e.g. C/Y 35-70, Loxia 50, Contax G45 and ZE/ZF/CY 1.4/50, so it hard competition but I think it will shoot some landscapes in 2019 summer.
I mostly have shot this lens with A7r, but few times I have used it with A7r mkII and I have accidentally used AF: it works surprisingly well [I have understood A7r mkII has phase AF or something, 70-400 and this lens focus only well with this body, and suck on A7, A7r and A7mkII - I'm not AF-expert, I don't need the functionality, mostly it causes harm to me]. Maybe all SSM lenses from Alpha SLR mount work well with AF with these phase AF bodies
In my opinion this lens works better with standard A7 cameras with thick sensor cover glass than with Kolari modified cameras. Difference is not large, but I shoot this lens few times with Kolari v2 and corner boke was little more busy and had little more astigmatism - I don't think I could ever see difference in focus plane, but in boke I think there is this difference. So I would assume that A900 etc. had also thick sensor cover glass. I have not tried it in my A850 as I could not find any compact flash memory cards 
Sony fantasy MTFs and optical structure:
All my online photos online shoot with Sony Planar T* 50mm F1.4 ZA SSM: link (I have not yet processed all 2018 photos, there might be few more during 2019 spring)
Samuli
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