Expanding the Equipment | Body with Lens Attached | First Tests | Preliminary Conclusions | Links

After Ricoh's official announcement of the M-mount expansion unit, I decided to buy one, although I had not intended to do so originally. Here are my first personal experiences with the lenses that I bought (or tried to buy): This page is devoted to the Zeiss Sonnar f1.5/50mm lens.

Note: In order to avoid copyright issues, I replaced the Zeiss lens photos with my own ones.

 

Expanding the Equipment

In October and November, 2011, I expanded my lens collection and bought eventually three Zeiss lenses for the M-mount unit, after having some trouble with decentered Voigtländer lenses.

First, at the end of October, 2011, I bought a Zeiss Sonnar T* C f1.5/50mm ZM (black) (75mm equiv.), my most expensive and fastest lens up to then:

    
     
 

Photos: Arrived on October 25, 2011: Zeiss Sonnar T* C f1.5/50mm ZM (black) (75mm equiv.)

This lens has a mixed reputation. On the hand hand it has been blamed for focus shift, and Zeiss gave an explanation of this. In addition, focus shift is primarily an issue with rangefinder cameras, not "when you see is what you get" (see the M-mount FAQ for details). On the other hand, this lens is also said to create 3D-like images, and posters in forums encouraged me to buy the lens. And that's what I eventually did.

 

Body with Lens Attached

Photo: Body with A12 M-mount expansion unit attached and Zeiss Sonnar f1.5/50mm lens

 

First Tests

Here are a few samples taken with the Zeiss Sonnar f1.5/50mm:

 

Preliminary Conclusions

It is far too early for me to draw any conclusions. Manual focusing is difficult with the 50mm Zeiss lens wide open - here my results are still inconsistent. For example, at f1.5 buildings that are 20m or even farther away may not be at infinity. Thus, at least wide open you cannot simply set distance to infinity and expect sharp images.

The other issue is that every fast lens has a very shallow depth-of-field when wide open. The viewfinder of the GXR does not have the quality of a good optical viewfinder that allows to control depth-of-field with ease. Screen magnification with a factor of 4x or 8x helps, but you cannot oversee the whole scene. Focus assist is neither in mode 1 nor 2 my favorite...

All in all, still some practice is needed for mastering this fine lens.

 

Links

An den Anfang   Homepage  
made by walodesign on a mac!
30.12.2011