Last week I spent. a couple of days at Two Medicine in Glacier Nat'l Park. A storm blew in on the second day which limited photography opportunities. I did get a night shot. - moonset over 2 Med Lake (see Sony Voigtlander 50mm Apo-L thread). That morning was reasonable nice, so I shot the scene with my Sony A7R III and 3 - 50mm f2 lenses for comparison - the Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar, Zeiss Loxia and my old Nikkor 50 HC on an adapter. This was not an in-depth scientific comparison - for that see Fred's thread on the CV 50. I was curious to see how my 50 year old Nikkor would stack up against two of the best manual 50mm primes in the E-mount
Since I only really use these in landscape photography, I was only interested in that application. I shot all three at f5.6, 8 and 11. I will be showing only the f8 images. All these were captured at ISO 100 and 1/400 s. Focus peaking was used to confirm focus. All imported into LR using the Adobe Standard profile, WB was set to 6000 (half way between daylight and. cloudy) and tint to +10. Exposure was raised by +0.25. OK - here we go:
These show the scene and compare for any color cast difference: CV 50 AL full frame 1 by Doug Stevens, on Flickr
Voigtlander 50mm Apo-Lanthar ("CV50")
and now for the all important corner test - I reframed with Mt SInopah in the top left corner. Heere is the composition (CV 50): CV 50 AL 50 full frame 2 by Doug Stevens, on Flickr
Granted, these are not the most demanding conditions, but I was pleasantly surprised at how the old Nikkor stands up against 2 of the best manual focus lenses for Sony mount, especially in the corners.
I hope some of you found this interesting!
Doug
Doug, many thanks for the great comparison.
I picked up a mint h.c several years back and was so impressed by the price to performance ratio that I ended adding the entire series to the collection. They are not bokeh monsters but are excellent everywhere else and as an added bonus, very little CA in my experience.
I have read the Ai may be the slightly better performer but I have not found much of a difference of between the multi coated versions.
