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Carl Zeiss Distagon 1.4/35 ZM review


Irakly Shanidze

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Dear Leica friends!

Even though not a Leica lens, it might be of interest to you...

Zeiss courteously sent me their new 35mm f/1.4 ZM lens, which I have been shooting for the past two and a half months. I wrote a review, which I tried my best to keep impartial. It wasn't easy, I have to admit...

http://blog.shanidze.com/-blog.html

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I wrote a review, which I tried my best to keep impartial. It wasn't easy, I have to admit...

IRAKLY SHANIDZE PHOTOGRAPHY BLOG - IRAKLY SHANIDZE • BLOG

 

Interesting, thanks. Have you tried the lens on a film camera?

As much as I pretend to be disinterested in this lens, I have, over the years, obsessively bought many different 35mm lenses for my Leicas and I think I'm going to have to at least try this one out at some point when it becomes widely available.:D

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Interesting, thanks. Have you tried the lens on a film camera?

As much as I pretend to be disinterested in this lens, I have, over the years, obsessively bought many different 35mm lenses for my Leicas and I think I'm going to have to at least try this one out at some point when it becomes widely available.:D

 

Best in class even when twice the size over the FLE but half the price is difficult to ignore.

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Yes, does look like a winner but I do wish there were one or two 'reviewers' testing these new lenses on a film body rather than the very predictable M240 and Sony bodies.

 

 

I don't know if you saw Ray Larose's report. It's on film.

 

http://www.raylarose.com/2015/01/review-of-the-carl-zeiss-distagon-t-1-435-zm/

 

Cheers, Horea

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You cannot expect much different on a film body. If anything, film is more forgiving.

 

Yes, to an extent – a case in point is how much more satisfying my 28 Summicron is with film than with a digital sensor (where it vignettes noticeably and has more "smeary" corners on the latter) – but I don't find that I learn much about the general "look" from these reviews on a Sony A7, etc. Most of these reviews are obsessed by sharpness and bokeh. I am less interested in the former (most modern lenses are plenty sharp enough for me to obtain a nice 12" x 8" Tri-X or Portra print) and I find the bokeh (which is interesting up to a point) is different when a given lens is used with film. I am also increasingly irritated that these bloggers and reviewers simply assume that the only relevant result from a lens is what a 100% crop from an M240 or A7s looks like.

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  • 2 weeks later...
But could you draw any real conclusions from the photos included there?

 

Yes I could. These pictures show several important, if not crucial characteristics of the lens performance at wide apertures: dynamic range, sharpness, contrast, light falloff and OOF rendering. I'd rather prefer seeing real life examples to pictures of resolution charts.

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