2016-03-10 16:59 GMT+01:00 Zane Healy <[email protected]>: > > > On Mar 9, 2016, at 11:37 PM, Paul Anderson <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > Popular or Modern Photography 20 or 30 years ago had an article on the 10 > > best lens ever made. I think Zeiss made 3 of them, and they were the only > > company with more than one. > > One of my all time favorite lenses is the Hasselblad 80mm f/2.8 Planar C > lens made by Zeiss. Even their low-end Tessar lenses are awesome. >
Anything made for Hasselblad could hardly be called 'low-end'. (A bit like a 'low-end' SGI, there was basically never such a thing... certainly not in terms of original cost.) The only truly low-end Carl Zeiss optics are probably the *Pentacon* series, made by the post-WW II Carl Zeiss Jena branch of the GDR. Take a look at the Sony a7 series of bodies, people are using RTS lenses on > them. You can put almost anything on them, and they’re a full frame > sensor. I know that the wider lenses might have some fringing issues at > the edges. Which (affordable) lens *doesn't* have imperfect edges, especially completely analog lenses without any in-camera digital correction. (This can also be done afterwards, if one knows the possible distortion values.) The Sony a7-series aren't exactly cheap. More affordable and rather good, too, are µ4/3 cameras, especially in conjunction with a focal reducer, if the crop is too much of an obstruction. I gain an extra stop of light, on top of reducing the crop, with my M42/Praktica thread mount lenses. My thorium-coated Asahi Pentax Super-Takumar 1.4/50's maximum diaphragm is effectively widened to an impressive ƒ/1. On top of that I have in-body image stabilization, good high ISO handling and other features, all at the fraction of the cost. On top of that, I can exchange my lenses with my dedicated µ4/3 Super 16 digital film camera. > I’ve started looking seriously at the a7 series, as it would allow me to > use a lot of lenses I have, that I can currently only use on 35mm film > bodies. > Nothing prevents you from using a full frame lens on a smaller (e.g. APS-C) sensor body. The crop isn't always a negative, sometimes it can change a mediocre tele-photo prime into an excellent one. > Since I started shooting more than just Nikon, it’s a lot harder to find > Nikon lenses I really like. The only AF lens I really like is the Nikkor > 50mm f/1.4G, at f/5.6 it can compete with my 50mm Summicron. > At ƒ/5.6 only? Well, that's rough... - MG
