davidrwilliams
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I was fortunate to pick up one of the used copies of the Milvus 18 that B&H recently had available. I'm still messing about with it, so don't have any postable quality images that I can yet share, but do have some initial thoughts.
To put it simply, wow.
From what I'm seeing so far (Nikon D810), I'm very impressed. I have experience using the Zeiss 21 Distagon (but not with a Canon 16-35), and it seems almost as though for the new 18mm, Zeiss took the 21/2.8 Distagon's flat field, contrast and sharpness characteristics, but removed the 21's corner colour shift, normalized the 18's distortion to a relatively small amount of barrel distortion to avoid the pronounced moustache distortion of the 21, shrank the lens' size by 10%, and widened the angle of view by the equivalent of the 3mm wider focal length.
The new 18mm has excellent contrast and sharpness across the frame (as expected, judging by the Zeiss published MTF curves), and seems to also possess the unusually high DoF that was a hallmark of the 21 Distagon design. The 18 has a similar vignetting profile to that of the 21 as well, with the traditionally higher amount of vignetting that Zeiss tends to produce in their very wide Disagons.
It's beautifully built, has really nice ergonomics and uses a usefully small 77mm filter mount (rather than the 82mm mount of the 21 and the prior 18mm f/3.5 "Classic ").
I've missed shooting with the 21 for some time, but with the new 18, I no longer see much need for the 21 unless someone really needs its focal length in place of that of the superb new 18.
Hope this helps...
(If you haven't already, check out Bryan C's review at "The-Digital-Picture" - I have no connection to him, I just like his reviews and image quality information.)
Edited on Jun 19, 2017 at 12:09 PM · View previous versions
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