I tested it with my IR Chrome filter which is nice and flat. This lens simply cannot compete with the 45mm GF in infrared. I will probably not hang onto it for the few times I want wide and IR and rather just stitch 2 shots with the 45mm together.
the F2.4 is a neat parlor trick if you only need the very centre of the image to be sharp.
I tested a bit more stringently and the right side of my lens definitely lags behind the left. So I will be sending this one back.
I got the Mitakon 30mm F2.4 in the mail today. Did some quick backyard shots to see where it how it was wide open and then stopped down. Very "dreamy" wide open. I would say it's soft wide open but that doesn't quite describe it. It's got an quirky nervousness in the corners that gives it that "pittura" painterly feeling that many fast wide angles have. It definitely has the rendering of an older lens, aberrations, vignetting, and form factor included. Obviously not for a lens for everyone.
Here's some pictures walking around last night. It reminds me a lot of the Voigtlander Nokton 28mm f1.5. If your a fellow enjoyer of that lens I would say it's a good alternative on the GFX system.
Is that streaking of the stars an artifact of editing or does the lens actually do this? (I no longer have mine so wouldn't be able to test it myself.
My Nokton 28/1.5 doesn't do that, it has pretty good stars all the way into the corners from wide open, other than a little coma. It is also sharp into the corners from wide open in a way this lens isn't. It has more vignetting than this lens though. The Nokton is very modern high contrast rendering, quite different to what I saw with the ZhongYi.
Is that streaking of the stars an artifact of editing or does the lens actually do this? (I no longer have mine so wouldn't be able to test it myself.
My Nokton 28/1.5 doesn't do that, it has pretty good stars all the way into the corners from wide open, other than a little coma. It is also sharp into the corners from wide open in a way this lens isn't. It has more vignetting than this lens though. The Nokton is very modern high contrast rendering, quite different to what I saw with the ZhongYi.
That's almost certainly from the long exposure time. I was hand holding those shots with times between 1/8th and 1/2 of a second. There is also a lot of planes that fly over where I was walking around. It's also there in the raw files.
JustAHouseCat wrote:
That's almost certainly from the long exposure time. I was hand holding those shots with times between 1/8th and 1/2 of a second. There is also a lot of planes that fly over where I was walking around. It's also there in the raw files.
JustAHouseCat wrote:
That's almost certainly from the long exposure time. I was hand holding those shots with times between 1/8th and 1/2 of a second. There is also a lot of planes that fly over where I was walking around. It's also there in the raw files.
With a 24mm equivalent lens, you probably would need to expose for something like 20 sec to see visible trails, so it's probably a moving object or camera shake.
mdude85 wrote:
With a 24mm equivalent lens, you probably would need to expose for something like 20 sec to see visible trails, so it's probably a moving object or camera shake.
For stars yes. That's most likely a plane which you definitely don't need 20 seconds of exposures for.
thrice wrote:
Keen to see more, even a boring photo of a starry sky from a tripod - if you feel so compelled.
Otherwise, glad you made the lens work for your intended purposes.
I don't know which picture your talking about but there's clearly planes in multiple of them and some of them have a little camera shake and/or distortion towards the edges with the stars not incredibly still. I was just posting some pictures I took to demonstrate how it renders street lights
IDK why everything on this forum devolves into technical nitpicking for something that is ultimately not controlled and never really is, and is instead actually just an artistic medium. It feels like people on here are more interested in cameras as an expensive toy than photography as an artistic medium.
It's a good lens for it's price. There's some distortion and wide open it is not incredibly sharp. It has a good atmosphere in it's rendering in my opinion which reminds me of old medium format lenses. If you care a lot about MTF charts and "optical flaws" the native fuji glass will be a better choice for you.
JustAHouseCat wrote:
IDK why everything on this forum devolves into technical nitpicking for something that is ultimately not a controlled and never really is and is instead actually just an artistic medium. It feels like people on here are more interested in cameras as an expensive toy than photography as an artistic medium.
It's a good lens for it's price.
I hear what you are saying but not really seeing it here on this thread. I'm guessing Thrice is interested in the lens performance on stars in the night sky on a tripod as an astro lens in Gfx mount remains an elusive thing. I'm not trying to poke at you but I find "its a good lens for the price" to be a fairly useless statement. If you don't end up liking a lens, you don't end up using it, and whatever you paid was a waste of money. It sounds like you are liking this one so far and that's great. But no reason to change the evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses just because its cheap.
SGinNorcal wrote:
I hear what you are saying but not really seeing it here on this thread. I'm guessing Thrice is interested in the lens performance on stars in the night sky on a tripod as an astro lens in Gfx mount remains an elusive thing. I'm not trying to poke at you but I find "its a good lens for the price" to be a fairly useless statement. If you don't end up liking a lens, you don't end up using it, and whatever you paid was a waste of money. It sounds like you are liking this one so far and that's great. But no reason to change the evaluation of its strengths and weaknesses just because its cheap....Show more →
I get wanting to see test what a lens renders stars like but i'm not really interested in pixel peeping. Seems like a waste of time to try and reduce anxiety about purchasing decisions worrying about sharpness on a lens like this. I would rather just look at the picture as a whole package.
It's not only in this thread but a bit of a larger issue i'm seeing happen in photography forums over the past 5 years or so. It's a fetishization of gear and performance. It's like complaining about a lens being soft. The implication is that sharpness is always better and softness is always worse. Truth of the matter is that there is a vast spectrum of different kinds of sharp and soft, some are pleasing to a lot of people and some aren't. It's not binary. 10 years ago soviet era lenses were seen as garbage and now we have major films shooting rehoused soviet glass.
The arrogance to describe a lens rendering characteristics as either good or bad shows a fatal lack of curiosity in the medium/art form. It makes sense if your primary intent is something ruthlessly efficient like shooting weddings, but this is clearly a manual lens meant for a slow and emotional look. That's why it has the name pittura. It renders closer to a painting. The fixation with sharpness for a lens like this seems to me like it's more indicative of a desire to collect camera gear like tchotchke or funko pops than it is to take images that feel like something.
JustAHouseCat wrote:
I get wanting to see test what a lens renders stars like but i'm not really interested in pixel peeping. Seems like a waste of time to try and reduce anxiety about purchasing decisions worrying about sharpness on a lens like this. I would rather just look at the picture as a whole package.
It's not only in this thread but a bit of a larger issue i'm seeing happen in photography forums over the past 5 years or so. It's a fetishization of gear and performance. It's like complaining about a lens being soft. The implication is that sharpness is always better and softness is always worse. Truth of the matter is that there is a vast spectrum of different kinds of sharp and soft, some are pleasing to a lot of people and some aren't. It's not binary. 10 years ago soviet era lenses were seen as garbage and now we have major films shooting rehoused soviet glass.
The arrogance to describe a lens rendering characteristics as either good or bad shows a fatal lack of curiosity in the medium/art form. It makes sense if your primary intent is something ruthlessly efficient like shooting weddings, but this is clearly a manual lens meant for a slow and emotional look. That's why it has the name pittura. It renders closer to a painting. The fixation with sharpness for a lens like this seems to me like it's more indicative of a desire to collect camera gear like tchotchke or funko pops than it is to take images that feel like something. ...Show more →
I agree with you in general, sharpness is not the final end game. Lots of other reason to pick a lens you like. But if someone asks you about coma performance on a lens that might be used for astro, that's certainly relevant to choosing the lens for that use.
As for the larger issue of thread de-railing and arrogance is forums, its unfortunately not restricted to photography sites. Anyone can be an anonymous expert behind a computer screen. I'm working on ignoring the useless babble and taking in the good and its not easy sometimes. Its far to easy to get sucked in and flame out a thread.
Would be happy to see more photos posted from this new lens.
@JustAHouseCat Shooting medium format digital and then calling others arrogant for being particular about detail and image quality with something for the same medium format digital system is certainly an interesting mindset.
I shoot with plenty of old medium format and large format glass, I still use some of it on this camera and of course I still shoot film.
Feel free to link me to the artistic portfolio rather than the test shots, if you wish to steer the conversation away from test shots... Which you posted.
FYI FM forums has photographic subject oriented sub-fora which do not deal with gear and they are very active. You have commented on a thread I created to discuss the technical aspects of these lenses.
The peripheral performance is so bad at f/2.4 that I wonder if they've even understood the concept of the sensor cover glass being a part of the optical system. I mean, it's not even a very fast lens and yet it smears worse than sort of any ~f/2 wide angle for 24x36, that isn't even expensive.
Sure, bokeh looks very nice at least at close range, but let me doubt that many users will care about that at 30 mm focal length.
And lets not slip into the hole of equivalence here, because it's equally easy/difficult to make an f/2.4 lens for any format.
Edit: I had the 65/1.4 for a while and it was even worse. Just unusable if you wanted to focus on something not in the exact middle of the frame. Hard to see how you can screw up a lens design so badly if you know what you're doing actually.
It does look like the corner smearing I used to get with M wides on my stock Sony! I didn't even consider that could've been the culprit.
I actually have the facility to shoot my GFX with a 2.3mm coverglass instead of the stock 3.4mm since it doesn't have a LPF2. I'm annoyed I didn't think to test that when I had the lens and just left my clip filters in.
Makten wrote:
The peripheral performance is so bad at f/2.4 that I wonder if they've even understood the concept of the sensor cover glass being a part of the optical system. I mean, it's not even a very fast lens and yet it smears worse than sort of any ~f/2 wide angle for 24x36, that isn't even expensive.
Sure, bokeh looks very nice at least at close range, but let me doubt that many users will care about that at 30 mm focal length.
And lets not slip into the hole of equivalence here, because it's equally easy/difficult to make an f/2.4 lens for any format.
Edit: I had the 65/1.4 for a while and it was even worse. Just unusable if you wanted to focus on something not in the exact middle of the frame. Hard to see how you can screw up a lens design so badly if you know what you're doing actually. ...Show more →
thrice wrote:
@JustAHouseCat@ Shooting medium format digital and then calling others arrogant for being particular about detail and image quality with something for the same medium format digital system is certainly an interesting mindset.
I shoot with plenty of old medium format and large format glass, I still use some of it on this camera and of course I still shoot film.
Feel free to link me to the artistic portfolio rather than the test shots, if you wish to steer the conversation away from test shots... Which you posted.
FYI FM forums has photographic subject oriented sub-fora which do not deal with gear and they are very active. You have commented on a thread I created to discuss the technical aspects of these lenses.
I have my flickr and instagram linked if you want a peak at a portfolio. I'm not particularly interested in going back and forth nitpicking and pixel peeping.
The arrogance I was talking about is in assigning good and bad labels to lens characteristics, not discussing image quality. This lens, like the Mitakon 65mm f1.4, was never going to be a corner to corner sharp and heavily corrected lens. It's meant to be compact and pleasingly soft. In my opinion it does a good job of that in a similar way to the voigtlander nokton line or older pentax lenses. It's focus fall off, soft highlights, and a fast yet wide angle makes it render closer to a painting in my opinion. Those are all fantastic technical aspects of this lens which are completely ignored if you hyper fixate on pixel peeping and charts. I'm not particularly interested in wether or not a budget medium format lens has theoretically perfect astro photography performance. I'll leave that one for someone interested in that.
Some of those dots in the sky are planes, landing at a nearby international airport, others are light traveling millions of years to be stretched around the curve of the glass stack house before landing onto the sensor. They both make up aspects of the image and looked nice to me. That's all that really matters at the end of the day.
JustAHouseCat wrote:
Truth of the matter is that there is a vast spectrum of different kinds of sharp and soft, some are pleasing to a lot of people and some aren't. It's not binary. 10 years ago soviet era lenses were seen as garbage and now we have major films shooting rehoused soviet glass.
The arrogance to describe a lens rendering characteristics as either good or bad shows a fatal lack of curiosity in the medium/art form. It makes sense if your primary intent is something ruthlessly efficient like shooting weddings, but this is clearly a manual lens meant for a slow and emotional look. ...Show more →
I agree that the lens does not really deserve criticism for being soft given that it's intended (by design or marketing, or maybe both) to deliver a "dreamy" or "painterly" texture. But personally, I'm not getting "painterly" from the samples you posted; the lens looks quite like any other Fuji lens, except it's a bit soft in the corners.
I think it is okay for people to criticize a lens as not being sufficiently sharp for their own needs, as that is simply an expression of what they value in the art form. "Fatal lack of curiosity" seems dramatic.
I think perhaps these early lenses might have some kind of flaw. They say that the lens has "almost imperceptible distortion" yet the distortion I observed was significant and akin to a modern lens which requires correction profiles.
I didn't read in any of their marketing that it was a painterly or character lens, it says it's suitable for architecture though, which I would say a character lens typically is not.
