Mike K
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 p.1 #1 · Zeiss 21 Vs 24 TSE II Vs 24-70L | |
Lens Comparison:
Zeiss Distagon 21mm F2.8 ZE Vs Canon 24mm TSE L II F3.5 Vs Canon 24-70mm L F2.8
Obviously a high quality prime should be able to out perform a high quality zoom at the same focal length, but the idea was to see how big the difference is at 24mm. The Canon 24-70 was used @24mm, TSE was used unshifted, and of course the Zeiss at 21mm, all were tested at F3.5, 5.6 8.0. Indoor mages were shot during the day the length of my living room. Capture was with a 5DmkII in RAW and converted to JPEG (faithful and minimal sharpening) and cropped or viewed at 100% for review. Focusing for all lenses was using live view at 10X using the material covering the speakers in the center of the frame. The outdoor shots were captured in JPEG and represent very close to infinity focus, again 3 lenses at 3 f values. Other outdoor images on my deck were also systematically compared but not shown. None of the images were resized and thus the Zeiss 21 images are smaller than the 24mm crops.
F3.5
Center: The Zeiss and TSE were comparable in sharpness and both were sharper than the zoom. The more distant objects were sharper on the Zeiss.
Side: The TSE was sharper than the Zeiss! This may be due to the focal length difference between the center focus point and the placement of the side object. The Zeiss may have been back focused a bit, while the TSE has a curved focus plane and would do better with closer objects near the edges of the image. Comparatively, the zoom was rather blurry. The Zeiss has visible vignetting at this F value, which is gone by F 5.6. This is well documented in the reviews. In the outdoor shot, the Zeiss had slightly better contrast and sharpness over the TSE in the corners.
F5.6
Center: The Zeiss and TSE have comparable sharpness, while the zoom is now close in sharpness to the other two lenses. However, the Zeiss has the best contrast, followed closely by the TSE, which is better than the zoom.
Side: Again the Zeiss and TSE have comparable sharpness, while the zoom is less sharp than both the other two. Subjectively, it appears as if the zoom has the shallowest corner DOF at the same F stop. With the outdoor shot, the Zeiss has the best contrast, the zoom the worst.
F8.0
Center: The sharpness and contrast of all three lenses was quite comparable.
Side: The Zeiss and TSE have comparable sharpness and both were slightly better than the zoom. At this setting the Zeiss has slightly better corner contrast over the TSE in the outdoor shot.
Other:
The sharpness and contrast differences noted above were generally fairly small unless stated as more significant. All of the images were also sharpened a default 250, 0.3, 0 and compared. The image quality trends were identical to those noted above for the unsharpened counterparts, but usually to a lesser degree. When the unsharpened images were close in quality, the sharpened counterparts were even closer (or indistinguishable) in overall quality.
The barrel distortion of the Canon 24-70 f2.8 at 24mm was noticeable when switching between the zoom and TSE image. This would normally be partially corrected for by PT Lens during Raw conversion. The well known mustache distortion of the Zeiss was not evident in these shots. Both the Zeiss 21 f2.8 and Canon 24 TSE II have 82mm front threads and will take filters, but none used here.
Here is the album with a few of the test images. Make sure you are viewing at “original size”. For side by side comparison you may have to download the ones you want to study and move them around in PS.
http://www.fototime.com/inv/7B57A747906A721
I temporarily changed the permissions to allow viewers to download these images.
Summary:
Its not that the Zeiss compared poorly, its that the other two lens performed better than expected.
The Canon 24-70 at 24 mm did pretty well, and when stopped down to F8 was as good as the primes except a slightest softening at the edges on the FF image. At f5.6 the zoom was very sharp in the center, but again degraded at the edges. At f3.5 the zoom was clearly not as good as the other two lenses; don’t use it here when IQ is important.
The Canon 24 TSE II really did remarkably well, matching the legendary Zeiss at sharpness in almost all instances, and only dropping a bit in contrast at the edges. This trend suggests that full shift or significant tilt may compromise IQ somewhat as the edges of the image circle are used to a greater degree.
I will be using the Canon TSE as a 24mm prime even when TSE movements are not needed and don’t even remotely consider the Canon 24 f1.4 L II. For now I will keep the Zeiss as well, and see if I use the 3mm shorter focal length of the Zeiss Vs the TSE for compositional impact, corner sharpness, etc.
Mike K
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