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Reviewed at MacPerformanceGuide
In Guide to Mirrorless are additional examples in New York City with the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar on the Sony NEX-7, this set taken in the evening while walking the High Line in the former meatpacking district.
Retina grade images as usual.
In Guide to Mirrorless are additional examples in New York City with the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon on the Sony NEX-7, this set taken in the evening.
Tioga Pass is my route through Yosemite to the high country of Yosemite as well as the White Mountains and Death Valley.
I expect to visit Yosemite in the next 2-3 weeks. Please contact me if you are interested in one-on-one photo tour.
Traveling to the Eastern Sierra? Check out reader Dennis Mattinson’s Eastern Sierra Weather Center.
In Guide to Mirrorless are added MTF charts for the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar and also distortion graphs for the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar on Sony NEX and Fuji X. Also vignetting on Sony NEX and Fuji X.
The MTF pages include a comparison on the relative MTF performance versus the Zeiss ZF.2 50mm f/2 Makro-Planar and Leica 50mm Summicron-M.
In Guide to Mirrorless are added MTF charts for the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon and also distortion graphs for the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon on Sony NEX and Fuji X.
Both pages include commentary, and the MTF pages include notes on the relative performance to the Zeiss 18mm f/3.5 Distagon and Leica 18mm f/3.8 Super-Elmar-M ASPH.
In Guide to Mirrorless are additional examples in New York City with the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon on the Sony NEX-7, this set taken on a morning walk from the meat-packing district to Union Square.
In Guide to Mirrorless, I’ve published a wide variety of examples in New York City with the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon on the Sony NEX-7.
Many Retina-grade examples are shown, most with both color and black and white renditions (the Touit 12/2.8 makes an exceptional lens for black and white conversions).
The Zeiss 135mm f/2 APO-Sonnar has tremendous penetrating power. With its high contrast wide open and superb control of color errors, it makes an exceptional lens for night-time photography.
A larger version of this image has been added to my Outdoors Examples page.
Can a 12mm lens (18mm equivalent on full frame) be used successfully for portraiture? I made the attempt and achieved some results that I like.
In the review of the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 Distagon are portraits in New York City.
Nine Retina-grade examples are shown, each with both color and black and white renditions. The Touit 12/2.8 makes an exceptional lens for black and white conversions.
To my eye, the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8 might be the best-performing 18mm (equiv) lens that I have yet seen, offering an impressive combination of sharpness, contrast, bokeh, and color correction.
And so I will say this: if you’re a Sony NEX shooter, this is a must have lens for wide angle work. Presumably the same applies to Fuji X, but I have not yet tested on the Fuji X-Pro1 or X-E1.
In the review of the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar are portraits in New York City.
Seven Retina-grade examples are shown, most with both color and black and white renditions.
I came away very impressed with the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar. This is a wonderfully balanced lens (in the sense of its drawing style, sharpness, bokeh, etc).
In the review of the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar is an detailed evaluation of bokeh with the Zeiss Touit 32mm f/1.8 Planar on the Sony NEX-7.
Five examples are shown, each with retina-grade images and crops, along with commentary. Much more is coming on both the Touit 32mm f/1.8 and 12mm f/2.8.
These examples leave little doubt as to the professional grade image rendition now available to those looking to shoot a smaller camera system. In my estimation, the two new Zeiss Touit lenses make the Sony NEX and Fuji X platforms much more attractive. Now having an extensive set of field images, I am comfortable saying that these two lenses would be my first choices on either Sony NEX and Fuji X; if anything they outperform comparable Zeiss lenses on full-frame DSLRs (Zeiss ZF.2/ZE 50/1.4 Planar and 18/3.5 Distagon). Which is what one would hope for in a modern design for a smaller sensor size.
The Touit lenses are high grade and ready for a pro-grade NEX or Fuji X platform. But as it stands, the camera body “gotchas” with NEX-7 are troublesome, as I found out in NYC, and this means more than irritation, it meant unexpected failures. Yet all it would take is some mild effort in firmware to fix at least some of them ( the NEX-6 fixes a few issues, but I wanted 24 megapixles, not 16). It is my uneasy feeling that both Sony nor Fuji have only a dim inkling of the needs of real photographers (ergonomics, elimination of arbitrary behavioral quirks, kitchen sink designs, hideously arranged menus systems). Let us hope that both vendors start taking serious input from photographers looking for reliable tools free of toylike design warts.
Heading to NYC for a few days for a Zeiss press event on The Birds.
The High Line walkway is visible at left.
I’d much rather drive if I could, but NYC is a long way from California.
I haven’t flown for about five years, and except for the return flight, I’ll be happy if I don’t have to fly again for another five. Airport parking was fine, and the TSA experience was actually just fine too (a bit of a wait but OK). So I got off easy there.
Then I boarded into a stuffy overly warm and humid airplane cabin yielding an almost visceral “unclean” feeling; under ordinary circumstance I would immediately have left such a place. But, this was my flight and we have to accept such things. As the plane lingered on the tarmac with a half hour delay, we were treated to the usual toxic stew of jet engine exhaust or whatever it is (am I the only one who finds it highly unpleasant?), followed finally by an improved brew: a bathroom-freshener odor from the air vents. With what feels like an incipient infection (my whole family has been sick with the latest public school germs), I was definitely not a fan of the experience . The dry air during the flight does not help matters. Well, I just like clean fresh air and I realize that such things probably don’t bother most people.
The seats are tight, but with an aisle seat and my own hand-carried sushi and favorite chocolate bar, I had a little picnic that proved most satisfying. But no power for my laptop and no WiFi in the old Boeing 757 with vintage CRT displays for movies, some magenta and some green in color cast, all showing the same insipid movie.
Suppose the 24-megapixel Sony NEX-7 were scaled up to full frame: it would become a 56-megapixel sensor at the same pixel density. So what would image quality look like? Pretty fantastic.
In Making Sharp Images, I show just what we might expect from a Sony NEX-7 sensor scaled to 56-megapixels, keeping in mind that the Sony NEX-7 technology has almost certainly been further improved (it seems so with the Sony RX100, which has a full-frame equivalent pixel density of 148 megapixels).
Oversampling (using ultra high-res sensor) can deliver very high image quality with smaller output files, but at a native resolution of 56 megapixels, the quality is already excellent even natively. You can’t lose with what’s bound to show up sooner or later!
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