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New L-mount lenses just started shipping


scott kirkpatrick

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That's probably not the lens' fault but an artifact which the image from the 24 was just enough smaller to trigger.  I'm struck, however, by how much better the multishot pics look.  I postprocessed them for sharpness with fairly large changes from the default setting, but who knows if the default is correct for these.

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21 hours ago, P1505 said:

Did anyone worry about bokeh before DigitalRevTV made it such a big thing?

I notice it a lot on TV. Sometimes a shot will have a very busy background with double lines. It's most conspicuous when a scene cuts between shots that have different kinds of bokeh.

The culprit here is probably long-ratio zooms (used in documentary, news, low-budget, etc.). They are perfectly sharp in-focus, but they can do strange things outside of the plane of focus.

I'm sure that many cinematographers and directors have known about this for a long time, but they must refer to it by a different name.

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On 2/4/2021 at 10:21 AM, scott kirkpatrick said:

Since the start of the Christmas shopping season, sometime in September 2020, I have been seeing Sigma's 24/3.5, advertised about once every three screenfulls, no matter what I was viewing.  Also  Panasonic's 85/1.8 L-mount  lens., Both of them look like they might be useful, and (by Leica standards) they are dirt cheap.  Well, about Feb 1, they suddenly began to ship, and here is what they look like on SL2s:

R1030076 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

It is raining and cold out, so I haven't explored wither lens in depth yet.  The 85/1.8 is about the size of the 75 or 90 SL Summicron, and a bit lighter.  It focuses almost as close, but not quite.  Color rendition seems nice:

S1010646 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

The Sigma 24 is quite a bit smaller than  an SL-SC.  At its closest focus the field of view may be even less than the SL SC objective of 5:1.  Even at f/3.5 that leaves a pretty soft background:

U1050490 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

But you can push the DOF all the way up to f/22:\

U1050489 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

Thanks for the info on the lenses - Curious what small tripods your two cameras are on?

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1 hour ago, double00 said:

Thanks for the info on the lenses - Curious what small tripods your two cameras are on?

Manfroto 709B.  2 kg capacity, and I frequently leave it on the camera to use as a handhold.  When the camera is waiting on its stand both the chips and the battery are accessible.

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Here zre some more shots with the Panasonic Lumix  85/1.8:

S1010693 1 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

S1010687 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

S1010685 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

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And the same scene, but with the 24/3.5

U1050530 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

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As with other non-Leica L-mount lenses the threshold at which an error message ("insufficient battery") prevents continuous shooting is higher with this lens than with the Leica Summicrons.  With only 1 bar remaining, my SL2 gave me the warning for the 24/3.5, but was willing to shoot with an SL SC50.  However, I only got four shots before it stopped with the same error message.  With 3 bars remaining, I could shoot continuously with the new Sigma.  Somewhere down with two bars remaining it was no longer able to shoot continuously.  Just reporting -- this doesn't seem to be a problem to me.

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On 2/6/2021 at 11:32 AM, scott kirkpatrick said:

And the same scene, but with the 24/3.5

Looks fantastic for landscape!

 

8 hours ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

As with other non-Leica L-mount lenses the threshold at which an error message ("insufficient battery") prevents continuous shooting is higher with this lens than with the Leica Summicrons.

It this also a problem on the SL2-S or does the SL2-S not suffer from any of the insufficient battery problems of the SL2?

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2 hours ago, beewee said:

....

It this also a problem on the SL2-S or does the SL2-S not suffer from any of the insufficient battery problems of the SL2?

It's not really an "insufficient battery" problem,  (after all, the SL lenses don't run into this error as soon), but most likely a loose specification of the L-mount spec.  Some of the other lenses seem to be drawing a larger current from the mount's electrical connections to power their internal motors.  This pulls down some internal voltage, which Leica measures in order to stop shooting before any pictures are lost.  They have certainly heard about this by now.  We'll see if the error limits are reset in some future firmware but apparently there is some difference between L-mount lenses from different makers that is causing this.

If I get a chance, I'll see what differences I find on the SL2-S.

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3 hours ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

It's not really an "insufficient battery" problem,  (after all, the SL lenses don't run into this error as soon), but most likely a loose specification of the L-mount spec.  Some of the other lenses seem to be drawing a larger current from the mount's electrical connections to power their internal motors.  This pulls down some internal voltage, which Leica measures in order to stop shooting before any pictures are lost.  They have certainly heard about this by now.  We'll see if the error limits are reset in some future firmware but apparently there is some difference between L-mount lenses from different makers that is causing this.

If I get a chance, I'll see what differences I find on the SL2-S.

Stephan Schultz explains the SL2 battery draw limitations with Leica, Sigma and Panasonic L-Mount lenses is this video.

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4 hours ago, RoySmith said:

Stephan Schultz explains the SL2 battery draw limitations with Leica, Sigma and Panasonic L-Mount lenses is this video.

Thanks for the link.  He confirms my suspicions -- other L-mount makers draw more current for their AF lenses than Leica had expected, and the result is an earlier cutoff.  

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1 hour ago, Eclectic Man said:

I had the 'insufficient battery' message at 3 battery bars using a Canon EF mount Zeiss 50mm f/2 macro lens and the sigma MC-21 adapter.  This is a manual focus lens, and the only power draw, as far as I am aware is the information and the aperture control.

There is another article about the MC-21 error message and a firmware update which helps here.

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Thanks for the link.  The problem is that the firmware update to push the limit down for the higher current lenses and adapters still hasn't happened.  And since it happens when the only current-consuming component is an adapter it may take hardware changes to fix. 

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Here's a test of sharpness of the Sigma 24/3.5 at long distances.  My favorite Jerusalem-observing spot:

U1050596 1 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr  SL2, Sigma 24/3.4 @ f/5.6

a 100% crop from the center

U1050596 3 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

and at the left hand edge

U1050596 2 by scott kirkpatrick, on Flickr

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7 hours ago, scott kirkpatrick said:

Here's a test of sharpness of the Sigma 24/3.5 at long distances. 

This is looking like a great landscape lens. 

I got mine last week and the SL2-S is coming in this week. I also have the 24 SEM, M10, and M-L adapter so it’ll be interesting to compare the various combos after the deep freeze ends. It’s -25°C to -35°C where I live right now.

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I finally had a chance to take the 24/3.5 for a spin.

Image quality is fantastic. So far my only complaint is that the focus ring is too narrow and too close to the lens hood for use with thicker gloves. The aperture ring is also a bit too narrow for use with thicker gloves.

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I don’t see any coma at all in the image. This was shot at ISO12500 with the SL2-S.

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