It's really cold here in East TN, so the new Otus didn't venture out much on the first day. This weekend i'll put it through the paces when we have several events and much warmer weather. In the meantime, I've posted a few quick indoor shots at our Voices of the Land exhibit at the East TN Historical Society, and a series of different apertures applied to the same object, a lantern/light on a 1902 Cadillac which may well have been Knoxville's first automobile.
--Dan
Here's the links to my gallery, which will eventually have all sorts of images, all made with the Otus 55:
Good to see shipments of Otus T* 1.4/55 has started! I'm trying to figure out should I get:
a) one more 5DmkII body + Otus T* 1.4/55
b) A7R + FE 1.8/58
and we (or at least myself..) need much more real photos from FM members to get better understanding of both of those lenses.
Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1.4/35 @ f/2.8 , 1/30s, ISO 100, polarizer
Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1.4/35 @ f/4 , 1/13s, ISO 100, polarizer
Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1.4/35 @ f/4 , 1/6s, ISO 100, polarizer
I won't know for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, how I'll do with the Otus. That it is a fabulous lens is already proven with images from the prototypes on the Zeiss website. For a lens this expensive and innovative, I cannot imagine anyone trying to judge it just by the images posted in forums. That's important, but the core information provided in Lloyd Chamber's paid review is worth the price many times over. I always use his reviews as my base, then go looking for images in the forums, photo websites and elsewhere. There is even a condensed mini review Lloyd did of the Otus that is free on the Zeiss website.
Check back on my website by Monday. I plan on doing three separate, dramatically different events with the Otus. I have the Coastal Optics 60, the ZF 135 and the Hartblei 80 to compare the Otus images to, so I'll have a reasonable base from which to form an opinion, I think. Lloyd just revisited the Hartblei 80, which is fairly rare and certainly not represented in forums very often. It has German made Zeiss glass.
I won't know for a few days, maybe even a few weeks, how I'll do with the Otus. That it is a fabulous lens is already proven with images from the prototypes on the Zeiss website. For a lens this expensive and innovative, I cannot imagine anyone trying to judge it just by the images posted in forums. That's important, but the core information provided in Lloyd Chamber's paid review is worth the price many times over. I always use his reviews as my base, then go looking for images in the forums, photo websites and elsewhere. There is even a condensed mini review Lloyd did of the Otus that is free on the Zeiss website.
Check back on my website by Monday. I plan on doing three separate, dramatically different events with the Otus. I have the Coastal Optics 60, the ZF 135 and the Hartblei 80 to compare the Otus images to, so I'll have a reasonable base from which to form an opinion, I think. Lloyd just revisited the Hartblei 80, which is fairly rare and certainly not represented in forums very often. It has German made Zeiss glass.
--Dan...Show more →
Dan, I have read about 1000 times the Lloyd's review, but for reason or another this time his review did only have only few images, which were useful for me. I'm almost always more interested about overall look, lens characteristics and specially bokeh behaviour (the Achilles’ heel of Zeiss ZE/ZF lenses is the bokeh behaviour in corners due to too small lens barrels - a feature which I sometimes demonstrate so people looking here understand what they are buying) than the pixel level sharpness - for understanding these I have found over the years that images posted to various treads in FM alt forum is the best source.
Specially images of posters, who's style I know and also understand their post processing style, are very illuminating. Once I get to home I'm going to study your image posts from last x years and then review your samples again to get deeper understanding.
I have an A7 coming in soon and I think I'm going to want to get a ~50mm with "character". FE 55 might be a choice, but I'm not sure it'll have any sort of "character".
I've looked at the ZM 50/1.5 Sonnar and it seems to render nicely (for me). Is there anything else I'm overlooking? Is the Sonnar really worth the $1200 it commands?
There will be a number of new images in my Otus gallery in a few hours. The weekend looks to be good, with good light, so there should be some revealing Otus results by Sunday night.
The images I put up earlier are by no means representative. I was jammed indoors in museum light. Much better stuff to follow. At least I hope so.
dubaiphil, nothing against your color works, but your B&W work seems to be always more interesting - great set! Do you just turn down saturation or use some fancier way to do B&W?
RiverGuy wrote:
There will be a number of new images in my Otus gallery in a few hours. The weekend looks to be good, with good light, so there should be some revealing Otus results by Sunday night.
Thanks for the new samples. Do you happen to have sample of anything shoot from 3-10 meters (9-30 feet) background starts from subject and continues further. I would like to understand relation of in-focus-target contrast vs. blurred background bokeh contrast&structure of the Otus.
Hard to explain, but I like VERY much of my current favorite 50mm (ZE Planar 1.4), and when closed down to f/2.5-2.8 it's "perfect"; optically everything on focus plane is "perfect" and bokeh issues have almost vanished. However I would not mind getting same results at f/2 or even f/1.4 - this is why I'm interested about Otus. If Otus just draws perfectly but doesn't have any character, I'm not sure if it's for me.
ZE-series lenses (majority at least) tends to give nice contrast in-focus and lower contrast in bokeh, which is very nice "feature". Based on samples this far in-focus and bokeh contrast seems to be same, which I find quite weird for Zeiss, but also most of the samples shoot by you and other lucky ones with the new Otus have been f/1.4, and due to too small lens barrels etc. this "feature" doesn't usually work wide open very well.
Hard to explain, but I would like to see some example image in situations like below (all f/2.8 with ZE Planar 1.4) [apologies if I repost some images, can't remember did I post these in 2012]:
Also the first f/2.8 image from 1.4/35 on last page is good example of this rendering style I'm looking for.
Samuli
PS. This is meaningless struggle, I try to find reason to not buy Otus and I'm pretty sure I end up getting it anyway...
