As you have discovered, the low element count theory became a heated controversy a few years back, featuring some pretty well-experienced you-tubers, and no shortage of naysayers. At present (as our ideas can shift over time, in a kind of Overton window of photography) it seems fair to say this:
If you use lenses with low element counts, they do not need more than rudimentary, yet expert, optical development (choosing words carefully here) to deliver high clarity and a kind of sparkle. They treat skin very well without appearing soft in the technical understanding of the word. Their general pattern is - if 'fast', that is f2 or faster - they are soft and dreamy wide open, ramping up to very fine imagery at f5.6 or f8.
Today, reviewers see this outcome as a flaw. It's because they have a 'lens first' checklist to work from, where some photographers use an 'image first' approach, they want the final image to be the focus of attention, not the arcane business of lens performance metrics against aberrations that are often used for artistic purposes, by design.
Zeiss artificially (by design) reduced the high detail of their first Otus lenses, until they worked out how to deliver higher MTF in the Otus 100mm. Their idea was to make their lenses do this at close range wide open. My 100/3.5 Sonnar has the same MTF as the Otus 55mm wide open, but at f3.5 rather than f1.4. It's not a coincidence.
If lens designers go the complex design route in search of very wide range/fast zooms or 'fast' max apertures with all of frame sharpness wide open, they will need the fancy glass treatment, and amelioration to deal with flare (still the bane of many such lenses) in the form of fancy coatings etc. So they reach for aspherics.
I'm trying to isolate, at the design level, the reasons and validity for the oft-heard charge of clinical rendering. We've seen both Zeiss and Leica, still giants of the design business, both produce cine lens ranges which hark back to something similar to what we had (and took for granted) a couple of decades ago. You might see it as a pendulum swing to its far extent followed by the arc returning somewhat.
Your Planar is typical of hundreds of such lenses that litter our history. The Otus I cited and the other APOs all use minimal asph presence for a very specific reason, whereas the seven asph surface Leica (well, Panasonic) used in the new Q3 43 (try saying that ten times) is an altogether different approach.
You can liken it to emptying seven spoonfuls of sugar in your coffee when you normally take just one. Not the same is it, yet they use the same process, only more of it. So aspherics have gained another role in design - to provide super levels of sharpness, no longer just to control distortion and spherical aberration. That much is new.
At the same time, some complex lenses noted by you are using really great glass in high percentages while minimizing aspheric surfaces, down to just one, maybe two for wide angles where all of field sharpness is inportant and the downsides of the process are not really an issue, due to unnatural angles of view and distortion, etc. It's expensive but superior. Asph, in its modern forms, is phone tech.
'the skin on that old woman and also the fur on the dog' will look great and even superior to many enthusiasts, which is why they do it. It's the sugar hit. It's unnatural, however, and the same thing is seen in many of the huge number of bird photographs we see here, that is an entirely novel development these past handful of years. Don't forget that the asph revolution is pervasive and will influence viewers, i what is now an optical arms race.
You may feel fine examining a woman's makeup application expertise, many do. I don't need to see pimples, spots, excessive lines etc., and I am not alone. Sharpness attracts first, subtlety is last. It's the same with contrast levels, saturation, brightness. We see the extremes first.
I was looking at some RX1 and FE55 images of people (I have hundreds) and noticed they were fine regarding this above problem. Despite having five asph surfaces, these lenses are not super sharp. They are solid examples of 'just right' for people photography despite still having review failure points like CA, and lower levels of sharpness. They were more interested in keeping the lenses small, so they are 8/7 (RX1) and 7/5 (FE55) to achieve this.
The CA seen is magnified by many but is seldom a problem. So Sony knew how to get this look before they set off on their participation in the arms race. By the way, you can see the Otus 100mm skin rendering in Dustin Abbott's review:
I really wanted to buy the Voigtlander FE 50mm f2 APO, but I can’t justify replacing my great copy of the Zony 55. Especially after reading Fred’s comparison between the two:
I agree with Fred’s comment that the Zony “is capable of very high resolution across the field even at wide apertures (no noticeable dips or field curvature), has fast/accurate/silent AF and it's compact/light at only 280 grams. In my view, it's a lens that does everything well from landscapes to portraits if you don't mind the uncorrected color aberrations. At wide apertures, a slight haze is visible due to SA under-correction which in turn gives images a pleasant lower contrast and smooth rendering”
His sample images clearly show the Zony performs “well enough”.
For me (IMO), autofocus is very beneficial, especially with eyeAF at the arguably normal/semi-portrait focal length (55mm).
However LoCa and onion ring bokeh can occasionally be a problem, but honestly, it’s rarely noticeable and a bit overstated for many users.
I have also looked at the Voigtlander FE 35mm f2 APO, but my Samyang FE 35mm f2.8 is absolutely perfect wide open. So I see little benefit going from a perfectly performing 35/f2.8 with autofocus, to a 35/f2 with manual focus (though many will disagree).
jaybr wrote:
I really wanted to buy the Voigtlander FE 50mm f2 APO, but I can’t justify replacing my great copy of the Zony 55. Especially after reading Fred’s comparison between the two:
I agree with Fred’s comment that the Zony “is capable of very high resolution across the field even at wide apertures (no noticeable dips or field curvature), has fast/accurate/silent AF and it's compact/light at only 280 grams. In my view, it's a lens that does everything well from landscapes to portraits if you don't mind the uncorrected color aberrations. At wide apertures, a slight haze is visible due to SA under-correction which in turn gives images a pleasant lower contrast and smooth rendering”
His sample images clearly show the Zony performs “well enough”.
For me (IMO), autofocus is very beneficial, especially with eyeAF at the arguably normal/semi-portrait focal length (55mm).
However LoCa and onion ring bokeh can occasionally be a problem, but honestly, it’s rarely noticeable and a bit overstated for many users.
I have also looked at the Voigtlander FE 35mm f2 APO, but my Samyang FE 35mm f2.8 is absolutely perfect wide open. So I see little benefit going from a perfectly performing 35/f2.8 with autofocus, to a 35/f2 with manual focus (though many will disagree).J...Show more →
Hi J,
I've had the Voigtlander 50mm f/2 APO for some time now (in both E and M mounts), and there are two features I really appreciate: the minimal color fringing and the clean specular highlights. Its resolution/contrast is slightly higher than the 55mm f/1.8 ZA, but I think they are comparable without pixel peeping too much. After several years, I repurchased the FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA, and I'm still very impressed with it. The autofocus is fast and accurate, plus the lens is lightweight and compact, making it a great match for my A7CR. My only drawbacks are the color fringing when shooting wide open and the onion ring pattern in specular highlights. Other than that, it remains one of the best E-mount lenses available today. I also love the way it renders images. Paired with the FE 35mm f/1.8, these two lenses are my go-to lightweight, fast autofocus options for the E-mount.
Adamwilbert wrote:
Just picked up a used e mount 50mm apo.
Is it normal for them to focus past infinity?
My copy will focus at infinity if I put the actual infinity mark at the dot, but that line after it seems well past it even for VERY distant subjects.
Yes, all CV E-mount APO-Lanthars are designed so that they allow focusing past infinity. Most other CV mirrorless lenses are also the same way.
From their E-mount lenses (I've had all of them except 12/5.6), I can use hard infinity on 15/4.5, 21/3.5 and 40/1.2 (original and SE) and with all others it's been necessary to focus a bit before hard infinity.
With their X-mount lenses only 18/2.8 and 27/2 are designed so that hard infinity can be utilized and all others allow focusing a bit further.
Juha Kannisto wrote:
Yes, all CV E-mount APO-Lanthars are designed so that they allow focusing past infinity. Most other CV mirrorless lenses are also the same way.
From their E-mount lenses (I've had all of them except 12/5.6), I can use hard infinity on 15/4.5, 21/3.5 and 40/1.2 (original and SE) and with all others it's been necessary to focus a bit before hard infinity.
With their X-mount lenses only 18/2.8 and 27/2 are designed so that hard infinity can be utilized and all others allow focusing a bit further.
In my experience CV M-mount lenses (especially the ones released in recent years) typically have hard infinity that is spot-on and can be used for optimal corner-to-corner sharpness on long distance shots since that seems to be more strictly expected by M-mount system users.
I don't have 50/2 and 35/2 in M-mount (since I always get the E-mount versions when available), but I did get the recently released 50/3.5 APO-Lanthar and that has spot-on hard infinity with my Rayqual adapter on my Sony cameras (A7CII etc.). Same has been true with all of their newly released VM lenses that I have acquired in the last couple of years. Their older releases weren't always spot on with this but I think nowadays they are making sure that newly released M-mount lenses are fully accurate in this regard.
When adapting M-mount lenses to E, the adapter thickness is often an issue though as very few adapters are designed to have precisely the right thickness (Rayqual adapters are designed to be precisely right). With slightly thinner adapters (such as Voigtländer VM-E adapters), hard infinity will become slightly beyond infinity again.
With precise-thickness adapters, there might be cases where certain lenses don't reach optimal infinity as there can always be some variation (especially with older lenses). Also some lenses have field curvature characteristics (esp. when adapted) that make it so that focusing a bit further than optimal infinity in the center could help mid-frame / corners etc. Therefore it's good to have a couple of different adapters. I personally have Rayqual and CV VM-E close focus adapter II.
It's not a great idea to adapt CV 50/2 and 35/2 M-mount versions to Sony though as based on Fred's reviews and others, those 2 VM lenses relatively much of their IQ when adapted to Sony (due to thicker sensor filter stack). However, 50/3.5 APO adapts very well to Sony.
Adamwilbert wrote:
Is this true of the m mount versions too?
ocean2059 wrote:
The APO-Lanthar 35/2 in M mount has spot-on hard infinity.
These well-corrected lenses should be perfectly aligned to infinity at the hard stop to ensure proper alignment with the RF. If the infinity focus is accurate, the focus at other distances will typically be accurate as well.
