Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/09/24
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]The short tele shoot-out A few years ago I did an assessment, mostly informally (i.e. by shooting and looking at pictures) with the following lenses which I begged and borrowed (no stealing was required): Pentax 85/1.4 AF Minolta 85/1.4 AF Nikkor 85/1.4 AF Nikkor 85/1.4 AiS Leica R 80/1.4 Canon FD 85/1.2 L Canon EF 85/1.2L Zeiss 85/1.4 for Contax Leica M 75/1.4 Leica M 75/2 asph Recently I got a chance to use a Zeiss ZF 85/1.4 At the time I was shooting a lot of portraits on black and white film. I was perfectly willing to buy a body to dedicate to any lens that didn?t match the cameras I mostly use ? Nikon SLRs and Leica M rangefinders. I found that all these lenses are great: they should be ? this is a focal length and speed where designers have a lot of flexibility and can create a really great lens and build it to a realistic price. The differences I discuss below are subtle and at times subjective. I tested the Nikkors on a range of Nikon MF bodies (FA, F3, FM2n) and some film AF (N90s, F100, F5) and digital (D200 and more recently D3) cameras. My informal trial with the Cosina built Zeiss ZF showed it to be almost identical to the older Kyocera-built Zeiss for the Contax cameras. The Zeiss is probably the most famous fast 85, but I could never figure out why. Spherical aberrations were slightly over-controlled, meaning that the bokeh was not as good as the best lenses in this class. If you think having good bokeh is not important in a fast short tele, you need to consider buying a slower lens: when you use it wide open, you are going to see a LOT of bokeh. The Zeiss does not have a floating element or an aspherical element, so the close-up performance suffers visibly (this also happens with all the other lenses that do not have a floating element). It is sharp across more of the image field wide open than either of the Leica lenses and performs very similarly to the Nikkor AiS. The Nikkor focuses to 85 cm while the Zeiss can only focus to 1 m. This makes a big difference for portrait work, but may not matter to some. Optically, the Canon EF 85/1.2 is probably the best of the fast SLR lenses ? it has an aspherical element, a floating element and two high-refractive glass elements, which aid performance admirably. But Canon EOS cameras drive me spare. The Leica 75/2 asph is its RF equivalent ? experience with Hoppy?s has made me want one. These lenses represent the current pinnacle of lens design for this lens type. Both these lenses are optimised for small image structures ? they render fine detail with incredible sharpness. I haven?t seen MTF charts for them but it wouldn?t surprise me if the 40 lp/mm transference was very high. The Leica M 75/1.4 and R 80/1.4 lenses both appear to be optimised for larger image structures and their resolution is slightly lower. This might matter if you use very fine-grained film or digital at low ISOs and need to retain a lot of image detail, e.g. if you enlarge a lot. Since I usually use medium-speed black-and-white film it didn?t matter to me. The bokeh of the Leica lenses, the Canon FD and EF and the Pentax were all good; their character does vary but this is purely personal preference - none of them showed any double line or other nasty tendencies. The Minolta came next, then the Nikkor AiS, which were both fairly neutral. The AF Nikkor and the Zeiss were a fair way behind and showed a lot of double-line tendency in the behind the sharpness plane bokeh. Colour rendition may be an issue for some. The Leica R and M and Canon EF lenses were the best in this characteristic, followed by the Pentax and Minolta, with the others occasionally showing some differences in transference. The AF Nikkor has some visible chromatic aberration created by its optical design and could be induced to flare a little more than the other lenses. The Pentax resisted flare the best but the AF was slow. The Minolta was excellent, but not visibly better than the others and the AF was also slow. Digital vs film use makes a difference. The lenses without a floating element display some focus shift, which wide open and close up, you will see with digital more clearly than with film because the emulsion depth is absent and cannot provide latitude for back focus. The Leica M 75/1.4 is very difficult for me to use wide open, close up on the M8, even after camera-lens calibration by Leica. As received from Leica, my 75/1.4 focuses ever so slightly in front of the object focused on wide open, but as you stop down the focus shifts backwards but within the depth of field. If you get your M camera and 75/1.4 adjusted so that focus is dead on at 1.4, it seems that it will backfocus outside the depth of field to f8. This is most important for rangefinder bodies, but you sometimes see effects with SLRs where you focus wide open but the lens stops down to take the image. There are two ways to fix this: chipped lenses can tell the camera body what the focus shift is at a given aperture and adjust appropriately (I don't think any manufacturer has implemented this, possibly because AF systems are still not as accurate as you might think) or optical design that minimises focus shift. The latter seems popular. AF didn't matter to me much - I can manually focus quickly enough. If you like AF, that limits your options. I ended up keeping the Nikkor AiS 85/1.4 and the Leica 75/1.4. None of these lenses focus close enough for a really tight face-only portrait. I got the Nikkor 105/2 DC for this. These days I?d be tempted by the Zeiss 100/2 Makro, descended from the really amazing Arri/Zeiss master Prime movie lenses and with Zeiss? newest, best coatings. I?ll try to get some more examples online soon, but already up: Cale ? Leica 80/1.4 http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Portraits/File0585.jpg.html Rachel ? Mixture of Nikkor 85/1.4 AiS (842,3) and Leica 80/1.4 (844,5,6) http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/Rachel/ Simone ? Leica M 75/1.4 http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene/mate/L1002529.jpg.html The 85 mm f1.8 and f2 SLR lenses from these manufacturers cannot be considered equivalent to these fast f1.4 and 1.2 lenses: their characteristics differ in a number of ways (they tend to be much more conservative designs, for starters) and they are often built to lower specifications, confounding optical comparisons because of sample variation. Two Nikkor 85/1.8 AF lenses I have tried have been particularly mediocre. I would be delighted if Nikon redesigned the AF 85/1.4. Zeiss probably should have thought about doing the same with their fast 85, particularly since most of these lenses will be used on high end digital SLRs. I also An even further OT observation I made during this was that the Canon New F1 camera is great: somewhere between there and the EOS 3 they seriously lost me. Marty Gallery: http://gallery.leica-users.org/v/freakscene -- Be Yourself @ mail.com! Choose From 200+ Email Addresses Get a Free Account at www.mail.com