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3rd party lens performance on SL


Winedemonium

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I have been using a Kipon Canon EF lens to M mount adapter for all of my Leitaxed lenses, which is the best EF to M adapter I have found. Not quite as good as Novoflex, but definitely better than the rest of the really cheap ones. They have a milled recess for the 6 bit code and Adorama stocks them...they are around $95.

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Well, I've been saying this for ages.

I think that manual focusing with a good EVF is best done with practice . . rather than assistance - either form zooming in or from focus peaking. 

It's so seductive to turn on focus peaking . . or to zoom in - it's there, why not use it.

 

But I'm quite happy focusing on the screen on all of my lenses - especially with the splendid EVF on the SL

 

Throw away that crutch!

I love the manual focus implementation on recent Leica EVF cameras is fantastic even without peaking,  I like the center magnification on my X113, but it is still quite easy to focus manually without it.  I usually leave it off for speed, and turn it on only when getting really close and shooting macros or in low light with low contrast.

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I don't want to get into a discussion about being able to 'nail' MF for this or that... :rolleyes:

 

Maybe I was not clear...

For my type of photography I often need to have precise control over depth of focus; hit the exact plane of sharpness - Not just get a 'object' within depth of field.

 

I think it is difficult to use focus peaking on the SL; zooming in with the view finder and at the same time changing aperture to stop down before shooting.

 

Automatic stop down was invented some years ago for SLR... Maybe there will be an auto stop down adapter for the Leica L mount like for Sony A7 series for modern SLR Canon and Nikon AFS lenses.

Such a Canon adapter would make the SL very tempting as a discounted used body in a few years.  For now using a split-image focusing screen on my 6D remains the best manual focusing method for a through-the-lens viewing system (just like an old film SLR), and better than RF for very wide, very fast or very long lenses.

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The Hasselblad CFi 100mm f/3.5 Planar is one of my all time favorite portrait lenses

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And the result today:

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FYI, I tried out a Zeiss 18mm f/4 Distagon on my SL and was not super happy with the performance. Mechanically it was fine--focus was smooth and aperture adjustments were more firm than most Leica l noses (in a good at), but there were some challenges optically.

 

First, there were issues with red borders. That was expected given how close the rear element lies to the focal plane. Choosing the 21 Elmarit pre-a sphere profile manually in the camera was a pretty good (but not quite perfect) match. Even better was to choose the exact right profile in Lightroom--the one for the 18mm Zeiss Distagon ZM. Almost perfect correction of color shift, vignetting, and distortion. So far so good. If you wanted to remove the color shift but leave the vignetting, I found I could also run the edge fix routine (flat field division) in Lightroom with the vignetting control turned off. Sounds totally workable, right?

 

There was one surprise left. Field flatness. While center resolution was quite good and distortion was low,, the corners were horribly out of focus when subjects were at a distance of roughly 1 meter. It was bad enough that even the depth of field you tend to get with an 18mm couldn't cover it for many situations. The SL might let you work around this issue since you can move your magnified focus point (unlike with Liveview on the M), but it would be hard to get enough depth of field even at f/11 to cover an off-center subject in the foreground and still leave the background crisp. I was hoping this could be my lily rawhide landscape lens for an upcoming trip, but I decided not. Just too hard to keep things sharp across the entire image with such a heavily curved plane of focus. Makes the issues with the 35mm FLE seem positively trivial.

 

I know others have had good luck with this lens on M bodies, but my experience was fairly negative on the SL, and it didn't have anything to do with corner smearing, cover glass, or micro lens design. It's just got a lot of curve to the focal plane.

 

- Jared

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When I tested I found very poor corner performance with W/A lenses on the M at very close distances ...... and generally even worse with the SL .....

 

At mid and far distance the corner performance was much better and the differences much less .... and sometimes the SL a bit better.

 

I suspect near performance is sacrificed on the assumption that most people won't be taking pictures of brick walls at 1m and correcting it optically is very difficult. 

 

Leica have enough trouble getting their own lenses working well with all their cameras .... non Leica lens performance appears to be very erratic and chancy.

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Yeah, I knew that there was a risk of poor corner performance with the Zeiss 18. I was expecting it to be limited to the extreme corners, though, in which case a little cropping would have been fine on subjects where the corners are critical. My problem is that most interesting photos made with ultra wide angles include compositional elements inside one meter as well as more distant subjects. After all, that's what wide angles are good at--expanding and drawing the viewer into a three dimensional space. I felt like I would struggle with the Zeiss on these types of photos. While it is probably doable with the SL since you can magnify any part of the view in order to evaluate sharpness, it would be almost impossible with the M where you can't get a magnified live view anywhere but the center.

 

If the entire scene were at 3m or longer, the Zeiss would likely do a fine job. Depth of field at f/8 or f/11 would easily hide the field curvature. But with elements inside 1m there is no way to get edge to edge sharpness.

 

- Jared

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By the way, at least one of the Leica ultra wides does not have this problem. The WATE has a much flatter focal plane than the Zeiss. Of course it is expensive and fairly large. Also quite slow, though that wouldn't matter for many wide angle subjects. Don't know about the various 21mm Leicas or the 18 SEM.

 

- Jared

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Expensive and fairly large also describes the Leica Super-Elmarit-R 15, but it's not so slow.  I've posted pictures with near details at less than one foot, far details at 3 to 5 feet, and distant objects rendered clearly.  Can't say anything about field curvature, as there was nothing flat in the pictures.

 

scott

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