At the time I bought the lens (new) from B&H, around 2022, the price of the lens was about $125. Low enough to qualify as a low risk experiment. A couple of days ago I was looking through CameraWest.com's "Latest Drop" of used equipment and I came across the same lens as a used item, in good shape, for sale for $395. I was puzzled. I haven't done a good job of keeping up with what's going on in the APS-C L mount category and wondered if, back in 2022 I had missed something in my initial forays with the product. Was it somehow much better than I remembered? Had it risen to cult status in the market niche? I was up for a challenge and so I decided to take the lens and one of the Leica CLs out for a spin. Seemed like a good idea on a late Saturday afternoon.
I set the camera for auto-ISO and limited the slowest shutter speed to 1/250th of a second. I mostly wanted to shoot the lens at wide open or nearly wide open because ---- f0.95! I don't have anything else nearly that fast so it makes sense to test it for its most standout feature. Right?
The CL doesn't feature in body image stabilization so setting a high enough shutter speed is important. The max ISO in the CL's auto-ISO menu is 6400 and in the dark you run out of ISO pretty quickly so it's fun to have a lens that compensates with an extremely big maximum aperture. Also, while focus peaking works pretty well with that camera the depth of field is so small with this lens when used wide open that I find it pretty much mandatory to punch in to a magnified view to spot check accurate focus.
The lens is very dense while having a fairly small profile, overall. It feels less heavy on an SL camera.
An interesting thing about the 50mm f0.95 is that I can actually use it on a full frame camera if I'm willing to accept a small bit of uncorrectable vignetting in the corners of the frame. The closer you focus and the more you stop down the smaller the vignetting effect is. When I put this lens on a Leica SL2-S and I shoot at night I change the aspect ratio of the frame from 3:2 to 7:5. This pretties up the corners and for most images made this way vignetting is much less of an issue.
The lens is a little soft at f0.95 and progressively sharpens up with each half stop down. By f5.6 it's on par with a lot of the 50mm legacy lenses people seem to like. But again, you are looking for things this lens offers that are more or less unique so I find myself shooting as close to wide open as I can and I depend on several fixes in Lightroom to give the lens back the contrast it needs and the sharpness as well. The contrast slider is your friend. The clarity and texture sliders are equally attractive for this lens. Finally, I tend to shoot this one entirely in raw so I can use things like the "raw details" setting to help out with the overall quality.
Some photographers, the ones bent on distilling the very last micron of performance out of their photography, might be disappointed at the contrast and detail of the lens at its widest settings and I certainly get that. But if you like a bit of character in your lenses and love shooting in the dark you could do a lot worse. Is it worth $395, used? God no!!! But is it fun to play with at $125? You bet. Blow up the attached photos and see for yourself. And ---- big treat --- more mannequins!!!!
Linen wrinkles too easily...
Bokeh central.
And that's the long and short of it.
3 comments:
The interweb tends to make me feel that I have not owned enough 50s in my life. And those mannequins with featureless heads, no nose, no eyes, are creepy.
It's possible that, in fact, you have not owned enough 50mm lenses in your life. And that your life might be much improved if you were to buy three or four more...every year. I know life is pretty good here, surrounded by piles of 50mm lenses. I don't find the mannequins creepy but I live in a country where there's so much creepiness how would I be able to tell the difference?
I recently got back from a trip that included Madrid. The Gran Via is one of my favorite places to photograph - the crowds of people look like they're in Disneyland or at a great outdoor party. Couldn't help noticing that so many in Austin look grumpy and distracted. Didn't get what they wanted for Christmas?
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