2016-03-10 16:59 GMT+01:00 Zane Healy <healyzh at aracnet.com>:
On Mar 9, 2016, at 11:37 PM, Paul Anderson
<useddec at gmail.com> 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 ?4/3 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 ?/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 ?4/3 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 ?/5.6 only? Well, that's rough...
- MG