Which 35?

[rwchisholm]

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I have owned the 35 1.2 nokton (a wonderful lens), the 35 1.7 ultron, the CV "pancake" 35, and now the 35 asph summilux. I love fast lenses (and fast cars and fast... I digress). I shoot much of my work wide open. Size, color/contrast, sharpness - the lux wins hands down for me! My copy is razor sharp open and stopped down. I bought used from popflash and feel it was a very good investment. The 35 lux has become my "lens cap" and I sold the others. --rob

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[stevem7]

Tough one. I have used/owned the 35 Nokton 1.2, the 35 Skopar PII, the 35 Cron ASPH, 35 Cron PRE ASPH, and have tested 4 copies of the 35 Lux.

 

The lens I chose was the Lux, but I love shooting at 1.4 and that is the only way I shoot it. EVERY copy I tested had focus shift from F2-F4. THEY ALL DO but it is minimal and most would not even notice it in real world shooting.

 

The 35 Cron is an AMAZING lens. I have one here right now shooting it side by side with my Lux. The size is perfect and its sharp at all apertures.

 

If you want to shoot at 1.4 and love shallow DOF, buy the Lux. If you prefer perfect sharpness at all apertures, keep the cron. Can't really go wrong with either though.

[ampguy]

Hi Lars,

 

For me, focus shift is very real. I shoot things close up and wide open all the time. Sometimes I will want to shoot a range of subjects wide open, and I want to know how much DOF I have without being surprised. A lens with severe focus shift will surprise you.

 

With SLR lenses and focus shift, you could see it, and touch it up. So, for example, if you were photographing 3 people, you could focus on the center person's face and if you had a lens with a lot of focus shift (e.g. '60s Nikkor 43-86 zoom), and you changed aperture, you could visually see the focus change and touch it up to ensure you got the foreground and background DOF, relating to the DOF scale on the lens, or other known method for DOF range.

 

With RF's, you don't get that option. When you change the aperture, your VF/RF doesn't change, even though your lens is changing it's focal plane.

 

 

I did never imply that focus shift ("aperture error") does not exist. It is an effect of spherical aberration, which all spherical optical elements produce. The question is, how much, and how important is it in practical picture taking?

 

Nobody whined about the focus shift of the 35 Summilux ASPH as long as film was all we had. The reason for the hysterics was twofold. (1) was real, (2) was psychological. (1) was the fact that a digital sensor does not have the forgiving depth of the film emulsion. So it is sharper. That means that what would have passed for good sharpness on film, suddenly didn't. The problem was really the absence of an AA filter, which would have filtered out the offending extra definition ...

 

The psychological part was that all of a sudden, we had instant feedback down to the pixel level. That changed a lot:

 

--Our focusing is imperfect, because man is imperfect. But when our Kodachromes came back from the lab, time had passed and we did no longer have an exact recall of what we intended and what we did when we took the picture. That is the 'instant' part. Here comes the 'pixel part':

 

--No print or screen image is normally scrutinized down to pixel level. Field observations in museums and art galleries tell me that when people want to see a picture as a picture, and not in order to examine some technical detail, they chose a viewing distance about equal to the diagonal of the picture. So the criterion is not absolute size, but a certain angle of view. If the image is accepted as sharp at that angle, you can enlarge it to any absolute size, *because the viewing distance will be adjusted to preserve the optimal viewing angle*. But pixel-peeping is like printing to two-by-three feet size and then assaulting the picture with a 8x magnifier. Of course you do find imperfection, like lack of sharpness, maybe lateral colour, and in the bad old days, grain. Grainchasing was a popular spectator sport in the days of film. Exhibition prints had to be shown under glass in order not to be ruined by the nose grease of eager grain chasers. Is that relevant to the image?

 

The point is this: Much of the fuss was about normal 'pilot error'. Most of the rest was due to applying criteria -- pixel level criteria -- that were completely irrelevant. The only realistic criterion is actual pictures of realistic subjects, viewed under realistic conditions. The focus shift of my Summilux has not ruined one single picture for me. Not because I happen to own 'a good specimen' but because I judge for myself, and resist being swayed by temporary panics. And also because half a century of picture-taking has taught me a sane attitude to 'sharpness'. There is more to a picture than resolution. Or there should be. But sharpness is the fetish of boring photographers. -- Also, I don't blame my own mistakes on the lens.

 

The old man from the Age of the Cooke Triplet

[ChrisC]

I don't remember giving permission for those pictures to be reproduced on another site. Whose site is that?

 

Sean - I too followed the link. If indeed your images have been nicked from Reid Reviews without your permission I hope you get a suitable outcome. Given how much work lies behind them, and the subject within them, I'd be very angry in your shoes. Please let us know what progress you make, and if [as it appears] your in-depth work has been a victim of copyright theft.

 

............. Chris