Hmm. Well, what is your personal experience in proof of this allegation? I have used Pentax lenses extensively, as well as lenses from Nikon, Olympus, Canon, and Panasonic amongst others, as well as a number of both Leica and Zeiss lenses.
My experience shows me that: Regardless of manufacturer or the so-called lens testers like DxO, there are specific lenses in every lens line that are outstanding performers. And there are lenses in every manufacturers' lens line that do not perform up to their most outstanding performers. The differences between the manufacturers lie in the delta between their top notch offerings and their most mediocre, and in how many lenses fall into the mediocre class vs the top notch class, and in what their average lens performance is like. So this is how I rate the lenses I've used ... and remember that I've used many many lenses over a span of 50+ years to develop this evaluation: In the first category (the delta between best and most mediocre), Leica and Zeiss consistently show the least delta; Olympus and Nikon are the next tier down; Canon, Sony, Panasonic, and Pentax are the lowest tier. In the second category (what percentage of their lens offerings fall into the mediocre class) Leica and Zeiss have the lowest percentage that rank down into mediocre where Pentax, Sony, and Canon have the highest percentages. Olympus, Nikon, Panasonic are all in-between. I didn't list consistency of build quality because, of course, I have only rarely had access to several examples of the same lens from any manufacturer at the same time to get a feel for that, but I tend to think that the same rankings apply because by the law of averages, the lenses I've had should be reasonably representative of the averages in spite of the small sample size.* In the third category (what the average lens performance of a manufacturers' entire line taken as a whole is), there is no question that Leica and Zeiss produce the highest average performance across the line and that all the others are much more variable across their lens line. One reason for this is that Leica and Zeiss generally speaking only produce a small number of lenses compared to the others, and they're all at the upper range of price and design spec envelopes, where all the rest make a larger number of from dirt cheap consumer grade lenses up to top notch, 'price no object' pro lenses. With Leica and Zeiss lenses, the discussion between equipment geeks isn't so much "this lens is so much better than that lens" as it is "I like the rendering qualities of this lens a bit more for this subject matter than that lens" ... When it comes to buying Leica and Zeiss lenses, I can generally advise a newcomer by saying, "All the options are pretty darn good, but you might like this one over that one due to its price and these characteristics" whereas with other manufacturers' lines it's more, "Buy this one because that one doesn't really work all that well." So while your thesis can be true ... you can indeed 'go ahead and buy an expensive Zeiss lens when you can choose to buy a similar or better one for less money' in many cases ... the statement is both a bit simplistic and actually doesn't reflect the practical reality: it's more difficult to know what you're getting with those less expensive lenses. Sometimes you can get a real bargain, many times you get something that is mediocre and doesn't stand up to close scrutiny. (BTW, despite that I have a pretty complete kit of what I find to be truly excellent Leica and Zeiss lenses nowadays, the Pentax FA77/1.8 and FA43/1.9 Limited lenses remain in my topmost tier of lenses I remember fondly for their excellent performance. I still have an FA43 Limited, in fact, and even though I only use the K-01 very infrequently I'm loathe to let go of it just because it gives me access to that lens on its native mount.) G > On Jan 23, 2017, at 9:17 AM, Bipin Gupta <[email protected]> wrote: > > Sorry Godfrey for mystifying you. > > The last line is pretty clear "go ahead and buy a Zeiss Lens for $$$$$ > when you can buy > similar or better ones for much less". > > > Someone was expounding the Zeiss Lens for Pentax DSLRs. No doubt Zeiss > make great > lenses. But all I was saying is that you can buy just as good ones > from non Zeiss sources > at half the cost. > > I was also making the point that Germany & Zeiss are no longer world > leaders in Lens design. > > Regards. > Bipin. > -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
