Thanks for all the work and sharing. I've had all three lenses in the past. My previous superstar the Zeiss 50mm f1.4 was finally upseated by my current superstar the Nikon 50mm f1.2 AIS which is simply incredible. Don't know if it's my copy or the lens in general.
I was expecting the Leica to have better bokeh than the Zeiss, which frankly I don't find very attractive at all. And yes, the Leica does look flat and lifeless wide open. I've wanted to try one for a while now, but I can't say this test inspires too much confidence that I'll be happy with one.
The so famous Nikkor 50mm f/1.2 AIS... that's a lens I would like to test. I may search for one at a good price when I can sell two of the three 50mm I already have
I'm finding that, for me, the 50mm is the hardest focal lenght to be satisfied with, maybe because there's so many choice? On the other focal lengths I pretty happy with all my first choices: OM 18mm, OM 24mm, Leica 35mm and Canon 85mm.
Just a small remark about the first infinity focus series: you can see that the sun was quite a bit lower at the time the Tamron images were shot, which probably explains why they look quite a lot warmer/more yellowish.
It's also my impression that the Zeiss is the overall winner and that the Leica looks really quite flat and lifeless.
The only weakness of the Zeiss' bokeh is polygonal highlights. All the other lenses show less of it. So the contrast behind the focal plane is higher with the Zeiss.
Number of aperture blades doesn't always help wide open though. Some of the roughness you see in some lenses wide open has to do with the design of the lens and not the blades. Blades rear their ugly heads when you are stopped down some and you can see non-circular highlights.
That being said, I'm sure there is a lens or two out there somewhere whose aperture blades are visible even wide open which would contribute to the bokeh look wide open.
kidtexas wrote:
Number of aperture blades doesn't always help wide open though. Some of the roughness you see in some lenses wide open has to do with the design of the lens and not the blades. Blades rear their ugly heads when you are stopped down some and you can see non-circular highlights.
That being said, I'm sure there is a lens or two out there somewhere whose aperture blades are visible even wide open which would contribute to the bokeh look wide open.
And that lens is the Pentax 55/2 ;-) It's one of the oddest ways of making a cheap variant of a lens anybody's ever come up with but the 55/2 is just a 55/1.8 with the aperture ring changed so it doesn't open up all the way. Pentax did much the same thing with the body which the 55/2 came on originally, the SP500, which is a Spotmatic SP with the 1/1000 setting left off the shutter dial markings (the position is there) and uncalibrated.
The weird thing about the 55/2 is it managed to stay essentially the same through 4 different versions (Super-Takumar, S-M-C Takumar, SMC Takumar and SMC-Pentax). It's also a great bit of glass as cheap normals go, much better than the 50/2 which replaced it.
Nice tests, if a little hard to see diffs in small images. In the larger head to head of the Leica and the Zeiss, the focal plane on the Leica is significantly off from that of the Zeiss.
Focus aside, even the Zeiss looks fairly flat in that comparison. Could be a function of the lighting being of limited contrast in the scene, hard to really force the 3D look under those conditions.
I was quite surprised at how the Tamron faired in the bokeh test. It looked about as good as any of the others.
I prefer the Zeiss to the OM lens in the bokeh department judging from these shots apart from the polygonal highlights at certain apertures. I agree that the Leica looks dull compared to these two.
The Rokkor 58/1.2 is (in my opinion) awful and very busy wide open - it looks like one of those "HUNGOVER?" t-shirts where the text is fuzzy and gives you a headache trying to read it. It is distracting and takes away from the subject. It is one of the most overly hyped lenses I think.
It also seems to suffer from focus shift when stopped down according to some users. I actually discussed this over a cup of coffe today with a fellow photog and he sold his copy shortly after getting it - the fab wore off swiftly.
Great bokeh lenses around 50mm are pretty hard to find - I can't think of one I have used that I really, really liked. But the Planar 50/1.4 was ok.
Brainiac: that looks pretty nice actually, one of the better examples I have seen. Normally they look too busy. Those shapes in the background look like ufo's.
kosmoskatten wrote:
Brainiac: that looks pretty nice actually, one of the better examples I have seen. Normally they look too busy. Those shapes in the background look like ufo's.
Probably because most of the time people are taking pictures of bokeh and not actual interesting things.
Nice pic. The lights look cool in the back, even if that lens does look to be a bit over corrected.
AhamB wrote:
Just a small remark about the first infinity focus series: you can see that the sun was quite a bit lower at the time the Tamron images were shot, which probably explains why they look quite a lot warmer/more yellowish.
It's also my impression that the Zeiss is the overall winner and that the Leica looks really quite flat and lifeless.
The only weakness of the Zeiss' bokeh is polygonal highlights. All the other lenses show less of it. So the contrast behind the focal plane is higher with the Zeiss.
The yellow break light is a polygonal highlight. It's a six-sided polygon because although the aperture has eight blades, the mirror box has flattened four of the blades into two. The fainter highlights show the full 8 sides.
