Glad to hear it, Perry. I suspect that may be part of the issue with the party shots that were OOF - unfortunately a friend of mine was shooting most of the time, so it's hard to know exactly how he was shooting. I religiously use the closest AF point, but I handed my MKII to a friend who's used to shooting with a 20D, so who knows? Unfortunately neither Lightroom nor DPP show the AF point, so it's hard to verify and it's impossible to know how they actually moved after AF'ing.
Anyway, glad you're happy with yours - it's a great lens.
Sam Bennett said: The interesting thing in all of this is that people seem to be surprised that the 50/1.2's sharpness is not significantly better than the 50/1.4's. I don't quite get this, because the 50/1.4 has always been pretty well respected in the sharpness department, particularly once stopped down a little.
I might not have been so pessimistic about the sharpness of 50 f/1.2 when it was announced (50 /1.4 is sharp but not exactly at < f/2.0) but I should not comment further about the lens I do not have.
All I know is that I should thank all who tested the lens and posted the results. I did hope that I would have this lens but I might have had unreasonable expectations.
I find this interesting that some think that there does not have to be a compromise between sharpness and microcontrast.
Harvey Moore wrote:
Use zoombrowser to find af point
Yeah, I know where to go to find it, but all the stuff is in Lightroom and I don't have the time to go back and forth. And again, knowing the AF point is one thing, but it doesn't tell whether the person recomposed or not, so it's fairly unreliable information unless you know the camera was in AI Servo, etc.
Again, since the majority of the shots from the party I'm referring to were shot by someone else, it's hard for me to know if focus/recompose was used. And of course with my shooting, it's hard to know if the bottle of Maker's Mark, mixed with a little Johnny Black and that fabulous Patron Anejo could possibly have anything to do with the deteriorating image quality throughout the course of the evening. (they do explain the headache the next morning though)
fourfa wrote:
Is no one else disturbed by the green fringes around the highlights? My 35L does the same thing and I find it pretty disturbing, it's evident even on 600 pixels web size shots. Sent it in for calibration and it came back the same. So I guess it's probably normal, perhaps an artifact of UD or aspherical glass or some such. Anyone know?
Actually, no. I'd be more pleased that the out-of-focus edges are softened as they are on the 1.2. While the 1.4 isn't horrible, it definately suffers in the bokeh department by comparison. Look at some of the other bokeh examples (ones without the extremely bright lights) - the 1.2's background has a much softer blur than that of the 1.4. It's due to the softer edges on the OOF disks. The background blends more smoothly.
Sam Bennett wrote:
Considering Andy's showing two different apertures here, I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret the result. The 50/1.4 shot shows the same problem to a minimized degree. My question would be: What does the same shot with the 50/1.2 look like at f/1.4?
The purpose was to show what the OOF specular highlights looked like, wide open. And to show that the 1.4 did not produce such effect when wide open. There was a poster a few pages back that said something like "any fast lens / wide aperture" will do that....
I didn't shoot the f/1.2L at f/1.4 in that scene, sorry
No problem, Andy. I just seemed like you're characterizing it as some sort of design flaw, when really it may just be a problem inherent to trying to go this wide at that particular focal length. If the issue is only really present when shooting that sort of thing and it happens only at f/1.2, then the solution is to stop down when you know that's going to be the case.
I guess I just consider it like I do the problem of birefringence - it's an issue that should get fixed, but the fact is that all Canon's fast primes (regardless of quality) suffer from the problem if you're using them wide open. Instead of bitching about it, I simply do what I have to do - stop down.
That isn't to say the issue should be ignored, just offering a little perspective.
Andy wrote:
But it it $1300 worth of "more smoothly"
Hi Andy,
It does not matter, like most quality stuff, it is never worth it if you want me to be honest with you. We have to always pay a premium for things that have just that little bit of extra quality, thats life. Most importantly is we feel happy about what we have purchased and go out and shoot photos and be happy
Sam Bennett wrote:
but the fact is that all Canon's fast primes (regardless of quality) suffer from the problem if you're using them wide open. Instead of bitching about it, I simply do what I have to do - stop down.
But the 50 f/1.4 doesn't suffer from it, used wide open. That's what my sidebyside shows. Or am I just being dum (quite possible!).
Andy wrote:
But the 50 f/1.4 doesn't suffer from it, used wide open. That's what my sidebyside shows. Or am I just being dum (quite possible!).
To my eyes, it suffers from it to a lesser degree. I was referring to all of Canon's fast primes suffering from birefringence wide open, not what you were showing. My point was that what you're showing may not be a flaw of the lens design, it's just a fact of life of lens design at that focal length. So, if the f/1.4's design was squeezed a bit more to go open to f/1.2 you may see the same thing. And then, the point is that if the 50/1.2L does not show the issue at f/1.4, you have a workaround - just like how stopping down works around the birefringence example.
I know bringing up birefringence is a bad example since it ultimately is a problem inherent to sensor design, but I still think the analogy is relevant. Expecting that a lens will perform flawlessly "wide open" in comparison to other lenses while disregarding what they're actually doing is silly. It's like railing on the 35L for not being "as sharp" wide open as the 17-40 is wide open. Well, the 17-40 damn well better be sharp wide open, since it's at f/4 and the 35L is at f/1.4.
Andy wrote:
But the 50 f/1.4 doesn't suffer from it, used wide open. That's what my sidebyside shows. Or am I just being dum (quite possible!).
I repeated your test with 85L f/1.2 & 50 f/1.4 wide open and got similar results - clear clipping with 85L but no clipped highlight circles with 50 f/1.4. The FL/aperture for 85L is about 70, for 50L it is about 40 and for 50 f/1.4 it is about 35. It looks like the diameter of the OOF highlight circle that fits unclipped in the EF mount/mirror chamber is between 35 and 40.
Koivulehto wrote:
I repeated your test with 85L f/1.2 & 50 f/1.4 wide open and got similar results - clear clipping with 85L but no clipped highlight circles with 50 f/1.4. The FL/aperture for 85L is about 70, for 50L it is about 40 and for 50 f/1.4 it is about 35. It looks like the diameter of the OOF highlight circle that fits unclipped in the EF mount/mirror chamber is between 35 and 40.
That math works in this case, but I don't think it proves anything. What about this FL/aperture value of 200/2.8, 300/2.8, etc. Even greater values but no issues that I've heard of or seen. There's more to that equation....perhaps angle of view as well.
The 50/1.4 has some barrel distortion. I'd like to see it reduced a great deal on the 1.2, but I haven't seen any tests of that aspect of performance yet. The best I saw, and it wasn't a good test for that purpose, was somebody's test shots a month or two ago - looked pretty good in terms of barrel distortion, but it wasn't enough evidence for me.
Either way you cut it, if you have circular lightsources that cause chopped out-of-focus highlights, then somewhere along the light path there is something in the way. Either internal baffles, the lens barrel itself, or possibly the entry to the chamber. (I didn't think about the last one initially.)
The horizontal and/or vertical straight cuts from the bokeh shapes are likely the chamber opening, the circular cuts causing highlights to appear like footballs/eyes/rugbyballs are from internal baffles or the inside of the tube.
And no, it is not a fabrication or calibration issue, it's inherent to the lens- and mount design....Show more →
Here's a bit of information on the "cat's eye" effect on bokeh, as well as a mention of mechanical clipping of the OOF highlights due to the mirror chamber being too small for the speed of lens used (85/1.2 in this case).
Also see this on optical vignetting - there's an interesting illustration (second set of images down) that describes the basis of optical vignetting, but also is illustrative of the "cat's eye" effect on OOF highlights towards the edges of the image on very fast lenses:
(they do explain the headache the next morning though)
Or am I just being dum (quite possible!).