90 summarit..is it just not that good?

[Carduelis]

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As someone who owns both the current Cron and 2.5 Summarit, I can't agree with your claims. At 2.4 the Cron is in a different place, as it should be for the price differential. Even at f8 I can see a slight difference. I'm testing the new 90mm Sony FE and the current Cron is as good as that.

 

Gordon

Although I do not own the current Cron, the MTF profiles (as I interpret them) support your findings.  If I was more heavily involved in portraiture as opposed to travel and hiking, I would buy one. 

[CheshireCat]

90 is hard unless you are very steady or have 1000 shutter or greater.

This is the same as saying that "a 45mm lens is hard unless you are very steady or have 500 shutter speed"... And I may agree, provided you are using a 400 MP sensor

[wlaidlaw]

I have the 75 Summarit/2.5 and I too am lukewarm about it. I find its rendition somehow a bit flat. It was a very early one in the first week they came out. For this reason it actually makes a good lens for technical and copying photography, which is what I use it for most of the time. I was thinking about getting a 75 Summicron or a Zeiss Contax 85/f1.4 (I have a number of other Contax lenses and a couple of Novoflex CX/Y to M adapters) but in the end for photos which have more sparkle than the 75 Summarit seems to provide, I will use either my 90/2.8 Elmarit-M or use a Contax Vario-Sonnar 28 to 85 at 75 mm. 

 

Wilson

[tom_uk]

Apologies if I'm speaking out of turn here - I'm an ex-Leica user (M6TTL about 10-12 years ago) who's switched pretty definitively to Canon EOS.

 

One of my reasons for doing so was Canon's IS - Image Stabilisation. As I've got older (I'm a recent pensioner) I have been appalled to find out just how much I need IS - I would't use a non-IS lens now for anything longer than about 50mm. I've done careful tests of targets 100 feet away using a lens in three configurations: handheld with IS off, handheld with IS on, and tripod-mounted, and the honest truth is that these days I'm nowhere near getting crisp shots, handheld with IS off, using the reciprocal of the focal length. I found that I need to go at least one stop faster than that. So with a 90/100mm I can't *reliably* get sharp shots at 1/125, let alone 1/60, I need to go to 1/250, and so on up the focal lengths. Of course, the IS makes a huge difference - with IS on, 1/60 is fine for the short end of my 70-200 zoom and 1/125 for the long end.

 

So without making any judgements of the OP, my personal experience has been that as I've got older - and especially in more recent years - my ability to get sharp images when hand-hold longer lenses at longer exposures has greatly diminished.