Just picked one up and not much time to shoot with it, just some junk around the yard, all at f/1.8 on the M9:
A bit of a swirly rendering here:
Wide open it\'s not super sharp, but still good enough where the text on the side of the ladder is very clear (naturally it doesn\'t translate at web rez):
My guess is the overcast sky in the background caused this image to go fairly flat. I ended up bumping up the black point to 20 and used a fairy aggressive tone curve. Unlike the other images here though, the contrast setting was at the LR default 25:
Initial thoughts:
Nice build quality, decent focus throw for accuracy, just barely cuts into the lower right 75mm frame line without the hood attached. Optically it reminds me somewhat of my Canon EF 50 f/1.2L, in that it also has that soft glow wide open, in this case through to f/2.5. At f/2.8 it\'s sharp. Maximum sharpness appears to be between f/4 until f/8. It exhibits focus shift. At f/2.8 it\'s about bang-on with my rangefinder. At wider apertures it front focuses; about 2.5cm when focused on an object 1.5m away. Though I have images where I thought the rangefinder was spot on and so is focus at f/1.8... so it\'s possible I\'m just not always able to eyeball accurate focus. I\'m reconsidering getting an eyepiece magnifier. However, I did some stationary tripod tests running through the aperture range and there is definite focus shift.
I haven\'t shot with it much in \'real world\' conditions, but feel it\'s a bit on the flat side and might lose additional contrast in backlighting. While all except one image above were processed at the LR black point default of 5, most had contrast jacked to around 50 (though I also do this for many of my ZM images). Normally I would also add clarity, but with the nature of this lens being a bit smooth and soft, opted not to here in order not to excessively change the character of the lens. Contrast was further bumped, as well as colour saturation, through fairly strong tone curves. The point being all of the above images were adjusted to look pleasing (to me), rather than exhibiting straight from the camera rendering. At the moment I don\'t feel this lens will replace my 85L, but it may possibly give me a look similar to my 50L (I use it on an APS-H body, so the effective coverage is quite similar). And I need to explore the focus shift issue more to determine whether I can effectively compensate for it.
When I picked up the 75 I also had the chance to do a quick shootout between the CV 28 f/2 and the ZM 28 f/2.8, because now with a ZM 50 f/2 on it\'s way to me for Tuesday, I\'m thinking the 35-50 gap is a bit close and could go with a 28 between the 21 & 50. I\'ll possibly replace the ZM 35 C with the CV 35 f/1.2 MkII in the summer for when I need speed. Anyway, the CV 28 f/2 was better than I expected. On it\'s own it\'s a decent lens, though it does exhibit focus shift and the corners only get sharp around f/11, which surprisingly also appears to be where the lens attains highest resolution. The ZM on the other hand is the lens I would opt for unless I could not live without f/2 and couldn\'t afford the Leica. Typical Zeiss micro contrast and better global contrast. very sharp wide open in the centre, though corners are kind of soft. Corners sharpen up well at f/5.6, and the lens peaks around there or f/8 as well.
