Gary Clennan wrote:
Sharpness looks great but it has that signature jittery VC bokeh wide open...
+1 for jittery/busy/ugly boke
Phillip forest scenes all show pretty awful boke and Guy's frontal shot of car @ f/2 as well + many other f/2 samples, which are not "flower scenario" (=close subject, relative far background) or "urban simple boke scenarios" (=scenes where background is relative far and lacks structure and large texture).
This is typical to all lenses wide open, nothing new under the sun. The real question is how much stopping down is needed for the boke to smooth out?
Typically good * f/2 lenses, e.g. APO-Sonnar 2/135, ZM 2/35 (with suitable sensor cover glass/correction filter), require closing down 1 1/3 stops (=f/3.2) to produce smooth boke.
* = good from boke perspective, pixel peeping gets 100% irrelevant in my opinion if 1000px wide webthumbnail already sucks badly due to ugly boke, why anybody would like to see closer/larger?
Getting slightly interested about this lens as there is no great 28mm lens at the moment, but there are multiple good 35mm (FE1.4, ZM2/Loxia35, ZM1.4 and maybe the new Milvus 1.4, thou there is risk they ruined boke with too much focus on sharpness etc. pixel peeping qualities). Shooting 3-4 lens combos with 35mm do not work well in practice; "hole" from 35mm to 85/90mm is too wide for me and 50mm & 35mm are too close to each another, and 135mm is "too close" to 85/90mm, and also jump from 35mm to 21mm is mostly too big. 21-35-85-135 seemed good idea, but now shooting it in real life has changed my opinion. This lens would partially solve the middle/tele spacing issue, and on wide end 25mm & 35mm work better together than 21mm & 35mm.
