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Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda
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p.5 #1 · p.5 #1 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

GMPhotography wrote:
Yea sending choppy over for Fred to try it side by side with the others. Choppy is a special VC 15III has he had his petals ( hood) cut off by some very rude photographer.

I did several tests this morning with it for Fred and we decided best to have Fred test it against the copies he has. So hopefully he will have some updates later in the week.

My feeling is that your copy is better because you banged it against the wall to remove that hood!

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:00 PM

GMPhotography
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p.5 #2 · p.5 #2 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

I was going to say the Dremel vibrations are the cause.

Fred like any good Italian boy just slap it upside the head and it should work.

BTW in all seriousness this is fun to work as a team and come up with real answers to these kinds of things.

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:01 PM

Fred Miranda
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p.5 #3 · p.5 #3 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

GMPhotography wrote:
I was going to say the Dremel vibrations are the cause.

Fred like any good Italian boy just slap it upside the head and it should work.

BTW in all seriousness this is fun to work as a team and come up with real answers to these kinds of things.

It's team work but if your copy is really that much better, I may have to keep it as a souvenir.

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:12 PM

GMPhotography
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p.5 #4 · p.5 #4 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Yea I'm waiting for that to happen. Lol

I'm starting my wish list now. Lol

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:24 PM

Brandon Dube
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p.5 #5 · p.5 #5 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda wrote:
Update:
Guy just sent me some samples showing much better extreme corner performance. I have two CV 15/4.5III lenses here (M-mount and E-mount) and they perform similarly (I can't tell apart). However, it's still possible there are better copies out there.

Next week, he will ship his lens to me (Thanks bud!) so I can compare it side-by-side with mine. I will update the thread with the results.

I can clearly see astigmatism and low contrast towards the edges with my copies. It seems excessive and Guy's examples do not show that at all.

I don't think only astigmatism is the cause. What aperture is this at? If it is f/8, I would be surprised if there should be a large amount of coma left, but the large loss of contrast (see: bushes) is more indicative of coma than astigmatism. Certainly there is some astigmatism, but there is much more than that at play with the lens.

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:26 PM

freaklikeme
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p.5 #6 · p.5 #6 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

GMPhotography wrote:
I was going to say the Dremel vibrations are the cause.

Ah, the power of good vibrations.

Thanks for the testing, gentlemen, and for the visual reminder of how wide a 15 really is.

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:48 PM

Fred Miranda
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p.5 #7 · p.5 #7 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Diffraction also reduces contrast. I didn't think coma played a big role as most of the test images I examined were at f/8.
At first, with other images, I thought it was smear (being a variant of a rangefinder lens) but after placing different objects at the extreme corner area, there is a indication of astigmatism because the sagittal lines seem to be always sharp at infinity. I still think I have not seeing a good copy of this lens.

Brandon Dube wrote:
I don't think only astigmatism is the cause. What aperture is this at? If it is f/8, I would be surprised if there should be a large amount of coma left, but the large loss of contrast (see: bushes) is more indicative of coma than astigmatism. Certainly there is some astigmatism, but there is much more than that at play with the lens.

Apr 24, 2016 at 01:52 PM

pdmphoto
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p.5 #8 · p.5 #8 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred, did you test your lenses at the closer distance, similar to Guy's?

Apr 24, 2016 at 02:13 PM

Brandon Dube
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p.5 #9 · p.5 #9 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Easy way to test for astigmatism, if when you focus there is a point where sagittal features are sharp and another where the tangential features are sharp, that is astigmatism.

Apr 24, 2016 at 03:57 PM

Fred Miranda
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p.5 #10 · p.5 #10 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Brandon Dube wrote:
Easy way to test for astigmatism, if when you focus there is a point where sagittal features are sharp and another where the tangential features are sharp, that is astigmatism.

In theory it's easy but at the extreme edges of an 15mm ultra-wide (18mm to 21.6mm from center) with lower contrast and very strong vignetting it's not.

Apr 24, 2016 at 04:49 PM

jhinkey
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p.5 #11 · p.5 #11 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda wrote:
In theory it's easy but at the extreme edges of an 15mm ultra-wide (18mm to 21.6mm from center) with lower contrast and very strong vignetting it's not.

To make it harder, there are very little changes in focus at 12x magnification when slightly moving the CV 15 focusing ring.
But yes, I agree, it should focus on the sagittal or meridional lines if it's indeed astigmatism. Like you wrote, it could also be other aberrations in place. There is moderate LaCA towards the edges with the CV15 even when stopping down.

It would be nice if Voigtlander published MTF graphs...Show more →

I'm not alone then with difficulties focusing my 15/4.5 on my A7RII!
Unlike many of my other lenses that are very very obvious when peak sharpness is reached (I'm even talking about my 16/3.5 AI fish that clearly has a peak infinity sharpness), the 15/4.5 has a broad range of focus turn that all appear to be pretty close in sharpness in the center of the frame - never really looked in the corners while focusing to make sure they are "optimal".

I'm still interested in the native E mount version just for convenience of having the focal length/aperture in the EXIF.

- J

Apr 24, 2016 at 08:32 PM

GMPhotography
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p.5 #12 · p.5 #12 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

I would too like having the E version also but I need to find one as good as mine. Lol

jhinkey wrote:
I'm not alone then with difficulties focusing my 15/4.5 on my A7RII!
Unlike many of my other lenses that are very very obvious when peak sharpness is reached (I'm even talking about my 16/3.5 AI fish that clearly has a peak infinity sharpness), the 15/4.5 has a broad range of focus turn that all appear to be pretty close in sharpness in the center of the frame - never really looked in the corners while focusing to make sure they are "optimal".

I'm still interested in the native E mount version just for convenience of having the focal length/aperture in the EXIF.

-...Show more →

Apr 24, 2016 at 08:39 PM

Vcize
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p.5 #13 · p.5 #13 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one that has trouble manually focusing these UWA lenses.

Apr 24, 2016 at 09:20 PM

GMPhotography
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p.5 #14 · p.5 #14 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

I just have a hard time seeing the corners. Actually this morning testing for the extreme corners I had a hard time lining things up. But it's not that normal for me anyway. Usually you focus on center

Apr 24, 2016 at 09:27 PM

DavidBM
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p.5 #15 · p.5 #15 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda wrote:
The Samyang 14 is very similar in that respect. Hard to see peak sharpness especially when not focusing close to wide-open. With the Loxia 21 or even the 16-35/4 focus-by-wire zoom, you know when you nailed focus and it's much easier to evaluate astigmatism, field curvature, etc.

But, this image shows a case for astigmatism at the extreme edges of the frame. I will wait to receive Guy's copy "The Choppy" to further evaluate this lens.

Here is a section of the above image link showing how sagittal and tangential lines are focused in a different place at the extreme edge...Show more →

I think the trick would be to focus bracket in tiny increments in the corners when doing this test.

Apr 24, 2016 at 11:42 PM

Fred Miranda
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p.5 #16 · p.5 #16 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

DavidBM wrote:
I think the trick would be to focus bracket in tiny increments in the corners when doing this test.

I did bracket in small increments because this is actually the performance I get from my M-mount version. I really wanted to see if there was any improvement in the E-mount version, so I went out of my way to make sure I got this right.

So, I went from the 2m mark until the infinity hard stop (where it looks the sharpest at 12x mag. in the viewfinder) in very small increments. I took 5 images. At the 2m mark it looked worse but once it got close to the infinity hard stop there was virtually no differences at 1:1.

The best crop was actually at tad before the infinity hard stop for both my copies.
The extreme edge crop I posted on the first page is the best it can be from the lenses I have. I'm getting a new one next week. I'm starting to think I've tested 3 lemons so far.
Let's see.

Apr 25, 2016 at 12:34 AM

DavidBM
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p.5 #17 · p.5 #17 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda wrote:
I did bracket in small increments because this is actually the performance I get from my M-mount version. I really wanted to see if there was any improvement in the E-mount version, so I went out of my way to make sure I got this right.

So, I went from the 2m mark until the infinity hard stop (where it looks the sharpest at 12x mag. in the viewfinder) in very small increments. I took 5 images. At the 2m mark it looked worse but once it got close to the infinity hard stop there was virtually no differences at...Show more →

I reckon that pretty much settles it! Be interesting to see how Choppy shapes up, but I'ld put good money on him being very similar. Cosina seem to have pretty good variance, and the designs are tricky to make, so three lemons in a row *whose lemonness is pretty much the same* seems, ah, unlikely... And in any case, even though it's pretty slow it's a very compact lens and it surprises me how good it manages to be on a very high rez sensor! Especially without resorting to four double sided aspheres and every element bar two being low dispersion like the new Batis....

Apr 25, 2016 at 02:24 AM

mcbroomf
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p.5 #18 · p.5 #18 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

This is the test image I made with thew 15mm CV III M mount when I 1st got it. The link is to a 50% sized image if I recall correctly. Like Guy's, this copy seems to have very sharp corners. Taken at ~F9 on an A7R, a good distance away but not infinity. It was processed in LR with Auto CA on

Mike

http://www.pbase.com/mike_broomfield/image/159609836/original

Apr 25, 2016 at 04:14 AM

Aztatlan
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p.5 #19 · p.5 #19 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Fred Miranda wrote:
This is a tough test for any lens but you know which lenses come on top. It's very tough on an ultra wide.
The best ultra wide lenses I've tested so far are the 15/2.8 Distagon, Canon TS-E 17/4L and even the FE 16-35/4 perform better on that area (10%) at infinity.

I am curious Fred - have you tested the Tamron 15-30?

Apr 25, 2016 at 05:53 AM

GMPhotography
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p.5 #20 · p.5 #20 · Official: Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 III E-mount

Looks like a nice copy Mike. I'll find some sample images from mine I shot in NY . See how those corners look. Mike does yours have the petals on.

mcbroomf wrote:
This is the test image I made with thew 15mm CV III M mount when I 1st got it. The link is to a 50% sized image if I recall correctly. Like Guy's, this copy seems to have very sharp corners. Taken at ~F9 on an A7R, a good distance away but not infinity. It was processed in LR with Auto CA on

Mike

http://www.pbase.com/mike_broomfield/image/159609836/original
http://m6.i.pbase.com/g9/63/551663/2/159609836.gWcj4KEb.jpg

Apr 25, 2016 at 07:25 AM

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