@weezintrumpete It depends on your intended use. Are you looking for a well corrected lens or an art/character lens? Well corrected, then you will have to wait for the Fuji offering. The GFX lenses are expensive, but as good as it gets when it comes for performance.
I use the adapted fast FF 50's for artistic pictures or portraits of people. The Summilux-R 50 vignettes similar to a Noctilux f/1 on a M body. I won't say the rendering is exactly the same, but it has a similar feel.
Even if the lens does not vignette that does not mean the corners will have good performance. Once you move out of the 35mm image circle even without vignette you can see smeary corner performance. I set my expectations here very low to good corner performance at f/8-f/11 at infinity. Even here there are few lenses that can meet those criteria. They are all telephotos. Of those that perform well they fall below what a native GFX lens can do.
I’ll echo all that has been said about the 58/1.4. I was looking for a 50 I could use for portraiture, and with a pleasing foreground and background blur. I love it on GFX, where its signature look is even stronger than on FF. I also use it on my Z9, where its reputation for misfocus in the DSLR days has been replaced with lightning fast face detection.
I also have a Tamron 45/1.8. It has a pleasing look on GFX… good corners, no real LoCA, and good sharpness across the frame at any aperture. It focuses quickly and reliably on a Fringer adapter, also. If the 58/1.4 is “filmic”, the 45/1.8 is “technical” in rendering. It’s a nice for single-lens days, where I tend to reach for a “35” over a “50”.
I have a Rokinon 58/1.4. Looks like a typical fast 70s lens wide open—I use it on joy when I want this effect. At f/2.8 and beyond it is as good as anything else out there. I rarely use it because I like EXIF and don’t like losing aperture control.
I used the Oly 50/1.8 on FF and found it to be better at 1.8 than the 1.4 model. I found it a decent performer, but its background blur was very busy, so I haven’t tried it on GFX.
Also, I’ve heard some people say the Canon 50/1.2 is a good choice. I considered it instead of the 58/1.4 but I found the Nikon to have nicer backgrounds in the reviews I saw.
I used the Oly 50/1.8 on FF and found it to be better at 1.8 than the 1.4 model. I found it a decent performer, but its background blur was very busy, so I haven’t tried it on GFX.
It doesn't even cover 1:1 on the GFX sensor. Most of the OM lenses have a very small image circle, which of course is due to the compact design.
Makten wrote:
I would wait for the GF 55 that should be announced at the 12:th of september.
I’m holding out for the 55mm. They would have my money tomorrow if they offered a pre-order. I’m expecting it’ll be priced on par with the others around $2500. That’ll suck but I expect it’ll be exceptional and probably never be taken off of my camera.
I’ve been very pleased with the 50mm f/3.5, with the exception of the smaller aperture, it does everything extremely well.
More or less identical in size and weight to the GF 80, at 780 grams and 99 mm long. A tad larger than I had hoped for, but not too bad.
Edit: Uh-oh... Drpreview states that it focuses with a "micromotor", and that goes for the 80 as well. It would suck very much if they implemented the same horrible AF again.
On the other hand: "Combines a powerful direct current (DC) motor and a GMR sensor to ensure quick, precise and near-silent autofocus (AF)."
Never heard of that before. What is a "direct current motor"??
Perhaps overthinking it? DC as against AC, alternating current? Batteries in Fuji produce direct current, would be surprised if AF motorised anything else.
gyoung143 wrote:
Perhaps overthinking it? DC as against AC, alternating current? Batteries in Fuji produce direct current, would be surprised if AF motorised anything else.
Gerry
Yes, saying that the motor is direct current really tells us nothing. If it is powered by the battery in the camera it is direct current. They say it is powerful. That would be good if it is true. They say the new mechanism increases accuracy. That would also be good if it is true. As always the proof will be in the pudding, and we won't know until the lens is actually tested.
Steve Spencer wrote:
Yes, saying that the motor is direct current really tells us nothing. If it is powered by the battery in the camera it is direct current. They say it is powerful. That would be good if it is true. They say the new mechanism increases accuracy. That would also be good if it is true. As always the proof will be in the pudding, and we won't know until the lens is actually tested.
Yes, I think in this context they are referring to a DC motor system as distinguished from other types of motor systems -- ultrasonic, stepper, etc.
All of those motors are powered by direct current from the camera batteries but they're not all called DC motors.
“DC motor” to me in this context means the old, noisy, compact, and high-torque micromotors we’ve had since the early days of AF lenses. Such as the “angry bees” motors we had in the Canon EF 35/2 and 50/1.8, if you remember those.
Fuji has some “DC” motors that aren’t awful, so at least it’s not a kiss of death. The GF 80/1.7 is, the X 35/1.4 is, and I think the X 56/1.2 is? So it’s possible to make a decent focusing lens without the linear or stepper motors they typically put in high end lenses.
The rationale from Fuji for a DC motor has generally been “we needed something compact”. So perhaps it was a packaging consideration.
One of the things that stood out to me in one of the videos is the mention of one micron accuracy in the autofocus position sensor. That's astonishing but apparently the narrow focal depth demands that level of precision. Perhaps the motor type was chosen to complement the accuracy demand, along with compactness, and that speed may have been a distant third priority.
Surely any motor that is powered by Direct Current can be described as a DC motor, whether its traditional commutator and armature, coreless, linear, stepper etc. Separating one from the other is not understanding, or perhaps a problem with translation of publicity gobbledegook from Japanese to English, or anything else.
I know from sorting out poorly manufactured lens adapters, which are almost always too short, by shimming that 0.01 of a millimeter can make a significant difference in focus scale and register accuracy especially with short focal length lenses, there are 'only' 10 microns in 0.01mm so I would expect 'micron accuracy' or it wouldn't be much of an AF system.
