I'm sold on Zeiss and the beauty of micro-contrast and I currently own three lenses but I've noticed lousy distortion when using the 50mm Planar vertically on my 5D II and I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same experience?
Wilfredo wrote:
I'm sold on Zeiss and the beauty of micro-contrast and I currently own three lenses but I've noticed lousy distortion when using the 50mm Planar vertically on my 5D II and I'm wondering if anyone else has had the same experience?
My Planar 50 is my go-to lens, and I use it vertically more often than not, also on a 5D2. If you can show an example of what bothers you, I will look through my files to see what I can find either way.
philber wrote:
My Planar 50 is my go-to lens, and I use it vertically more often than not, also on a 5D2. If you can show an example of what bothers you, I will look through my files to see what I can find either way.
Phil,
I'm not home right now, but I will post some examples later. Aside from that I love the lens and the truly 3D quality if offers.
brainiac wrote:
Zeiss makes _really_ nice lenses for the M's too, don't forget. And as usual they are an order of magnitude cheaper than the Leica ones. If I could ever afford an M the first thing I would do is kit myself out with Zeiss ZM's (and Voigtlanders). You don't have to take flat-looking photos just because you use an M... ;-)
I mentioned earlier that I have 3 Zeiss lenses, one of these is the 18mm Zeiss for the M which I use on my Leica M8, and love it.
Definitely seen it before, it was the reason I stretched way beyond my budget to get a 35/1.4 Distagon!
No regrets at all its an astonishing lens. Even my girlfriend can tell a picture taken with it looks better - in my opinion that is the ultimate test of a lens's qualities. If average joe can notice a difference then the cost is far and away justified.
Infact Im going to put it on my camera right now and go take some meaningless pictures of boring things to satisfy my never ending urge to just use this lens
belsha wrote:
I thought about that too... But do the Biogon or ZM lenses have the same look as the Contax-Yashica ones? Are the Biogon and Distagon 21mm similar, for exemple?
Yes and no. The Biogons get closer in basic design to the Distagons as they get wider and faster. The 21/4.5 and 25 ZM's are the widest true Biogon designs, the 21/2.8 is really a combination between a Biogon and a Distagon and the 15 and 18 are actually Distagons (and are labelled as such).
And yes, the ZM's do get the Zeiss 'look'. Or 'looks' more appropriately, as the ZM 50/1.5 is an absolutely classic Sonnar design, with the unique signature that the Sonnar design brings which is somewhat different from the modern Zeiss look. However the 50/2 Planar and 35/2 Biogon probably show the classic Zeiss look more than any other lenses Zeiss currently makes.
StevenPA wrote:
Richard, why do your pics (and only your pics) come out looking like this on my monitor half the time? This is surely not the Zeiss look.
Whoa! I don't really know. I can tell you that I use command line tools to generate lowrez jpegs for the web quite often, so it could be that my jpegs have encoding errors in them that your system is sensitive to. It could also be something to do with the way images are served from my server. I wonder if anyone else has had this problem...
Wilfredo wrote:
Here are a couple of shots. In the horizontal shot the distortion is not as obvious but it is there. Again, theses were done with the 50mm Planar, on a Canon 5D II.
I don't see distortion in these. I am sure you're not talking about converging verticals, which you will see in all lenses when shot upwards.
Richard, okay, was just wondering. Sometimes the images come in fine, other times not. Sometimes the same image comes in fine one day, but not the next (I clear my cache regularly for some web work I do). And sometimes the patterns are a lot funkier than what I screen-captured above, like with blocked sections rotated or mirrored. Weirrrrd... Anyway, back to the Zeiss look.
brainiac wrote:
I don't see distortion in these. I am sure you're not talking about converging verticals, which you will see in all lenses when shot upwards.
I suspect I am talking about "converging verticals." I did some tests this morning with no tilting of the camera and the shots were fine, when I tilt I start getting converging verticals. I had never made this connection before, but thanks for the clarification.
Do some lenses handle converging verticals better than others?
Empire wrote:
Definitely seen it before, it was the reason I stretched way beyond my budget to get a 35/1.4 Distagon!
No regrets at all its an astonishing lens. Even my girlfriend can tell a picture taken with it looks better - in my opinion that is the ultimate test of a lens's qualities. If average joe can notice a difference then the cost is far and away justified.
I have been wanting this lens too, but now hope the ZE 35 1.4 version is coming out soon now that it was leaked.
Wilfredo wrote:
I suspect I am talking about "converging verticals." I did some tests this morning with no tilting of the camera and the shots were fine, when I tilt I start getting converging verticals. I had never made this connection before, but thanks for the clarification.
Do some lenses handle converging verticals better than others?
Basically, no. However, there are two ways of keeping your camera horizontal: (1) use a much wider lens and crop the bottom off the picture, and (2) use a tilt/shift lens which can be shifted upwards in order to look upwards even while the camera stays horizontal.
I don't know what it is, but they make nice lenses. I wouldn't get too caught up on it. If they make a lens that is the right focal length for you, you like the max aperture, it has the sharpness that you want wide open and stopped down, it handles flare to your suiting, it has a level of distortion you find acceptable, it has an acceptable size, you like the way out of focus areas look, and the cost of it is worth it, then go for it. Otherwise, don't. That goes for a Zeiss lens or any other lens.
I've still not heard one coherent description of what the 3D look is, whether its from Zeiss lenses or Leica lenses or anyone body else's...
Oh Wilfredo! I loooked at your pictures, intensely trying to see what was so obvious to you and mysterious for me. I am so relieved that Brainiac makes me feel like less of an idiot...
kidtexas wrote:
I've still not heard one coherent description of what the 3D look is, whether its from Zeiss lenses or Leica lenses or anyone body else's...
I think we know, intuitively, what a "3D look" is. Like pornography, I know it when I see it. ;-)
What isn't clear, or perhaps, well understood, is how Zeiss achieves the 3D look that we see.
