It is your lens or lenses and you can do with them as you please, of course. But why would you get a fast lens that excels at wide open or close to wide open and use it stopped down? Still, I just checked mine on the A7r III and A9, and the lens doesn’t have any problems focusing at f/8 though. For real life shooting, I do not stop down my 50mm f/1.4 smaller than f/2.8, mostly down to f/2, if that but I understand YMMV.
I don't see the advantage to anyone (except Sony and their retailers) in defending bad design. It's bad design to keep a lens stopped down when focusing for obvious reasons and that's the reason that virtually all camera systems (SLR, medium format or 35mm) over the last 40 or 50 years have their lenses stay wide open and only stop down when shooting.
And can you please clarify, does the 1.4/50 ZA stay stopped down when actually focusing manually on the A7RIII and A9 or does it stay (relatively) open and only stop down to the working aperture for the exposure (as does the 1.8/55 ZA)?
Calling that a bad design is ridiculous. Focus shift affects many lenses drastically.
I cannot understand at all, why you would want the lens to stay wide open during _manual_ focus. No manual lens from Leica, Zeiss, Voigtländer etc. works that way.
However: With the 50/1.4ZA my cameras in MANUAL focussing:
- Close to shooting aperture and stay there when using the aperture ring, irrespective of setting effect off/on
- When changing the aperture using the camera, the camera uses the shooting aperture if effect is set to on, BUT it stays around f2 when setting effect to off. Half pressing the shutter button then closes the aperture to the shooting aperture. So this mimics what you want: focussing at open aperture even in manual, but loosing exposure preview.
Jul 25, 2018 at 10:17 AM
Previous versions of Holger's message #14540075 « Sony 50mm 1.4 ZA vs Sony 55mm 1.8 ZA »
