Some of the things that were brought to my attention and required a little bit of research – I just wanted to post them here in case if there’s someone interested out there…
ZEISS versus NIKKOR lenses for your DSLR
A little while ago I met a guy who told me how fabulous Zeiss lenses are and how surprised he is that I haven’t tried them yet. He told me my local photo store rents them out and I went out and tried a 100mm T* Planar macro lens. Shot a bunch of cute stuff in the yard, if you remember my fallen leaves series, thought that – yes, he was right, totally cool lens, beautiful features, nice sharpness, amazing bokeh and all that stuff that usually comes along with nicely made and expensive optics.
After that incident I was pretty much running around with the idea of buying that lens to play with my Nikon cameras. The purpose of it would be to produce more of those beautiful shots, which I usually take my time with and don’t quite need the autofocus, that’s missing on all the Zeiss lenses. Which by the way raises my favorite question – WHY??? Someone online said that accomplishing autofocus on these lenses would make them even more expensive and also – they probably like to see themselves as those “old world” reps – “good photogs don’t need no stinkin’ autofocus”.
Another thing to know is that the lens still “talks” to the camera and there’s a focus indicator light that you can pretty much rely on in cases when you cannot trust your own eyes.
So, not everything is “bad”.
But what I’m thinking is – how good is the algorithm of telling the camera body that right now in this part of the image the focus is sharp, if the lens cannot quite tell the body which aperture is it at.
I’d really like to know how all of that works in a manual lens which the camera body only partially “understands”. So, there’s still some more searching to do.
Ken Rockwell presses it that there’s no reason to get Zeiss lenses for your digital Nikon camera, which kind of makes sense. It’s like putting better performance tires on a small engine car – the cost doesn’t really pay off. May be not exactly, but you get the idea.
And this is why at this point I decided to wait a little more (again). And if I really want to play with it again – I can always rent it for a weekend at my favorite shop here in Fairfield NJ. May be I’ll finally get that “not so expensive” Nikkor lens I’m missing in my arsenal and remove the IR filter from my old DSLR, so I have more things to toy with without missing the 100mm T* Planar…
By the way, if you are bored and into watching people fight – there’s a lot of heated discussions online about Zeiss lenses. Quite silly most of them, of course. Some never tried to shoot with them and accuse others of wanting to belong to “elite” zeiss user group, others want to shut them up… go figure *sigh*…
“People should be people” (all in line with “the work” of K. Baron, if you know what I mean…). Ah here’s a bit of mystery that I’m leaving behind!
Wonderful day to you all~
PS: I’m having fun with an idea of renting a Nikon D3X and two similar lenses – one Nikkor and another Zeiss. I think that would be a fair test of comparison. But testing them on a D90, I feel it might just be unfair to Zeiss… What do you think?
. My son surprised me one morning by tapping on my shoulder and as I turned around I experienced a vision tunnel. Do you know what I’m talking about? It’s when you look at something and your brain takes a dip into surreal… Like when you look at one of those 3D prints.
