Voigtländer SE series lenses announced (35/1.2, 40/1.2, 50/1.2)
Today I went out to shoot the SE 35/1.2 and VM 35/1.2 III side by side on my Sony A9 to see if there were actually any noticeable differences especially with the bokeh when shooting some targets at f1.2 and f2.0 in the 1-3m range and with some trees or plants in the background. I started with a tripod but I soon dropped it back home as it's pretty inconvenient to shoot with a tripod in Tokyo streets and I generally don't like shooting with a tripod. Afterwards I just tried to frame as similarly as I could by standing in the same position, using the small focus point to place my manual focusing target and swapping lenses back and forth.
The weather wasn't great for photography, mostly cloudy, and the shots reflect that.
In the end the main differences I noticed were in other areas than bokeh. My SE lens seemed sharper on the A9 at f1.2 when focusing on midframe, it seemed to become noticeable with some stone statues where I was getting better peaking and easier focusing on the statue faces and sharper results on the focused area. I was struggling to focus on some of them with the VM and not getting as sharp results at f1.2. I suppose it might be related to the lens optimization for the Sony sensor. The SE often had very noticeably faster shutter speeds than VM on the A9 at equivalent apertures with same camera settings. With AWB the colors usually came out a bit warmer with the SE lens. I didn't see much differences with bokeh at all in my testing today, but perhaps in a couple the SE had smoother backgrounds near the corners (especially at f2). Overall I prefer the SE version on the Sony Camera although the VM version also works well. I'll keep using the VM on my Sigma fp (it was the main purpose I bought it for in the first place).
20 comparison shots at f1.2 can be found at the link below. See the info (i) for each shot to recognize which one is SE and which one is VM (filenames and EXIF will show it, aperture is always shown as f/1 for the VM). They come up in the order they were shot and some shots were taken first with the SE and others with the VM. I always did the equivalent shots on one lens, then swapped, then kept the last lens on for the next shots and then swapped again to avoid having to swap the lenses twice as much.
I used Capture One Pro 20 to export the files from Raw and in some cases I adjusted the color temperatures to make them equal (in cases were they were too different originally). Default settings were used and all lens corrections that could have been applied with the Manufacturer Profile for the SE lens were turned off in Camera and also in C1 Pro (it follows the camera settings by default but the settings can be changed). Normally when not taking test shots I will probably keep 2 of the lens correction settings in Auto on the Camera (CA correction and distortion correction) and then they will be applied in C1 Pro via Manufacturer Profile automatically as well.
May 30, 2020 at 11:00 AM
Previous versions of Juha Kannisto's message #15241766 « Voigtländer SE series lenses announced (35/1.2, 40/1.2, 50/1.2) »
