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 p.23 #12 · Voigtlander 21mm f/3.5 Color Skopar Review | |
jcmurray56 wrote:
I’ve followed this (long!) thread with great interest for some time now. Thank you all for all the contributions, the tests, the discussions, the images. I really prize small, lightweight, and relatively cheapish lenses, and don’t need really fast f/1.4, etc. I liked what I was reading, and, having spent half my life shooting with lenses before AF existed, manual lenses don’t phase me.
So I took the plunge and bought one. Indeed, I’ve now sampled two copies, from different UK sources, both companies with a good reputation. I’m mostly a landscape photographer, and therefore need good DOF, along with edge and corner sharpness. When I get a lens I test it for de-centredness, using the test suggested earlier in this thread, and then I use a real-life viewpoint to test at various apertures from f5.6 to f11, focussing at various slightly different distances, to try to find the best combination of sharpness at infinity, and with nearer objects, before diffraction sets in.
My first copy of the CV 21mm was clearly somewhat de-centred, with the top and bottom right corners being weaker, especially the bottom right. This was even more marked when I went from infinity to objects about 3m distant. The second copy was less decentred, especially at infinity, but was still weaker on the right, though this time it was worse on the top right.
When shooting a real life landscape, I found that I simply could not get good sharpness across the frame at less than f5.6. Even at f11, I could not get both sides equally sharp. With the focus at the hard-stop, the corners would be sharp, but nothing else was. By putting the focus about 1-4mm down, depending on the aperture, I could achieve the best overall sharpness. By the time I get to the 2m mark, no distant object is sharp any longer. I tested using the A7rii and my original A7, and the results were the same. I too found some strange dips in sharpness in places in the frame, the mid-field dip others have mentioned, but by f8-f11 this is much less noticeable.
I then compared this performance with the Batis 25mm, and the tiny Samyang 24mm f2.8. A different focal length I know, but close enough to be able to draw some conclusions. The Batis definitely has more consistency across the frame, but is no sharper for probably 80% of the image area. The Samyang (I had to get a second copy of this to get a well-centred one) is just not quite as sharp on the 42MP, though on 24MP it looks very similar, even to the Batis! However, the Samyang does fall away towards the edges, and the extreme corners are really quite smeary. It is also useless unless shot at f9-f11, as the corners are unacceptable. Both my Batis and my Samyang show no obvious de-centredness however.
So all in all, I am maybe just a little disappointed, or maybe I just have excessive expectations. I wanted the CV 21mm to have something just a bit wider than 24mm, but light and small enough for carrying when out hiking. With 42MP, I also knew I could crop to 24mm, or even more, and still have plenty of pixels to print up to A3+ size.
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Sorry for your troubles. I've not actually 'tested' mine - I'm not sure I want to...... - but I've not noticed anything wrong so far with the images I've taken. I will say though, they haven't been full infinity style images. I bought mine direct from Robert White.
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