p.1 #1 · Leica SL APO 24-90 vs my old manual focus 50 mm lenses
Cold and rainy this morning so I did a little informal shoot of my Leica zoom against my cherished old prime 50mm's. Since getting the zoom I always have felt it was the sharpest zoom I've ever owned. So today to play around I set up a target subject, put my SL on a tripod and then went through all the lenses I had that I could adapt to work on the SL. I even threw in my old Mamiya 645 80/2.8 even though it doesn't convert to 50mm on the SL.
Lenses used:
Leica R 50 1:2.0 Leitz Wetzlar Summicron-R
Contax C/Y 50 1:1.4 Carl Zeiss Planar T*
Pentax M42 50 1:1.4 Asahi Opt Co., Japan SMC Takumar
Mamiya 645 80 1:2.8 Mamiya-Sekor c
Minolta MD/MC 55 1:2.0 Auto Rokkor-PF
Minolta MD/MC 50 1:1.7 MD Rokkor-X
Leica L 24-90 1:2.8-4.0
Shot each lens wide open, then at 2.8 and then at 5.6. Focused manually on the same spot on the Kaleidoscope and then used the 2 second self timer. I first compared all images at full size at the 5.6 aperture range. To my eyes it looks like the 24-90 wins in terms of sharpness. Still going to go back and look at all images to see what they tell me.
I don't have space where I host all my images to put all of the full size files but I did put all the ones shot at 5.6 for folks to compare. Could not upload the .dng files so I used affinity to batch convert to TIFF. If you click on "original" at the bottom of each image you can get the full size image.
Just thought it would be fun to share these for others to see, judge, argue about, etc.
I tried to also shoot my Canon EF 24-70 at 50mm but kept getting a lens error with the Villtrox adapter. The combo works fine on my SL2 but seems like the SL doesn't like it for some reason. I was using the SL to keep the file size down a bit but didn't realize I'd run into this adapter issue.
I will say that I've been fully comfortable just taking out my Sl bodies with the SL zooms (24-90, 90-280) but wondered if I was giving up some sharpness from my old primes for the convenience of the zooms. At first glance of these files, maybe not.
