Sony NEX7 (image: Sony)

Now Sony was about to change things in mirrorless country with the Sony NEX-7 release in late 2011, going along with the two new 24/1.8 and 50/1.8 OSS lenses. If you only consider high-quality lenses, it’s a two-lens-only setup but it is one of the first mirrorless cameras that you really could call an entry in the “serious amateur” or even “professional” market segment. This body sports a very sophisticated electronic viewfinder and a flash hot shoe. Probably the 18-200 OSS super zoom lens is an interesting companion to these. The other readily available Sony NEX lenses remain somewhat dull in comparison to DSLR systems. it The NEX-7 was very comprehensively reviewed by Michael Reichmann here at luminous-landscape.com. Still, apart from the limited lens selection, it’s also not exactly cheap: The set with two quality lenses is about €2500. Pretty much money. The most disturbing fact about the NEX-7, however, is probably the sensor choice. A lot of folks realize that the overall image quality of its much lesser brother, the NEX-5N, actually is better in a lot of circumstances, namely high ISO and also when using high-quality manual-focus rangefinder lenses. Even when using an adapted quality lens as long as 35mm, the NEX-5N beats the NEX-7 hands-down. See this comparison with the Zeiss Biogon 35/2 on the two NEX cameras. Hmm. And features such as weather sealing, being a standard for somewhat upmarket DSLR cameras, are still unheard of in mirrorless country. Why?

Nikon V1 (image: Nikon)

Sadly, the production of the NEX-7 was delayed for some time due to the terrible flood disaster that struck Thailand where the Sony production plants are located. Now, we are at the beginning of 2012. Nikon has brought us the Nikon 1 in two flavours, of which the Nikon V1 is the more sophisticated one. Yes it does offer a built in electronic viewfinder but it lacks a flash hot shoe. The single exiting feature about it is the autofocus system, apparently good enough for chasing flying birds – that’s a truly great achievement. Read this review by Thom Hogan for more information. Apart from the fast and accurate autofocus, the rest of the Nikon 1 sadly does not sound that exiting. I personally don’t see this becoming a true alternative to DSLR systems with their much bigger sensor sizes and resulting superior image quality. Yet it could be a good solution for some action and wildlife photography where the size of the camera gear does matter while speed cannot be compromised.

Olympus E-M5 with 12-50 – the first fully weather sealed mirrorless setup!

Speaking of autofocus performance, Olympus already claimed offering the “fastest” autofocus in mirrorless cameras when they released the E-P3 in 2011. Sadly, it’s one of those mirrorless cameras without built-in viewfinder. But Olympus changed the game with the launch of the shiney new E-M5 in February 2012 with a built-in viewfinder, a tiltable rear screen and – wonders of wonders! – a weather sealed body. Like all other Olympus mirrorless bodies, but unlike any other, the E-M5 also offers in-body stabilisation so these four crucial features – electronic viewfinder, weather sealing, in-body stabiliser and standard flash shoe – do really make it stand out pretty much in the mirrorless world!

The first weather sealed Olympus mirrorless lens, in fact the first weather sealed lens for any mirrorless camera, is already introduced in form of the Olympus Zuiko 12-50/3.5-6.3. But there’s the problem, yes you read it correctly: f/6.3. It’s the slowest zoom lens ever, only a few super zoom lenses with 10+ zoom ratios match these silly aperture numbers. Compare this with the 14-54/2.8-3.5 and 12-60/2.8-4 lenses for the old Four Thirds DSLR system…. What are they thinking? Anyway, it’s the world’s first fully weather sealed entry in the mirrorless game, it offers both internal zoom and internal focusing which is very unique and highly desirable for any standard zoom lens. See the comprehensive 12-50/3.5-6.3 review by Robin Wong here.

The bundle with the E-M5 and 12-50/3.5-6.3 is introduced to the market at €1299. In fact, these prices seem very sensitive in contrast to some other mirrorless manufacturers, even despite the ridiculous maximum aperture! So let’s just hope they come up with some faster and even more high-quality lenses. A nice weather sealed 60/2.8 macro lens with true 1:1 close focus is apparently just around the corner, for example. This all could become a very, very nice and robust package for travel and reportage. Also, the styling of the E-M5 is very appealing. A treat for your eyes, as they say. On the downside, the Olympus has only a 13×17 mm sensor format, so you’re not going to get those superb razorblade-thin depth-of-field effects. But then, you really should have a full 24×36 mm sensor for that, shouldn’t you? Something the others don’t offer just as well.

FUJIFILM X-Pro1 with 18/2, 35/1.4 and 60/2.4 lenses (image: Fujifilm)

Another most interesting entry, surely also a treat for your eyes, in the mirrorless world is the new Fuji X-Pro system. Fuji, well known for its somewhat unique, but always very high quality image sensor developments, finally introduces a complete digital camera system. They are well known to enthusiasts for camera systems as they do produce all the current Hasselblad medium format cameras as well as the now extinct, but still very nice analogue Hasselblad X-Pan series in 1998-2006. The new digital Fuji X-Pro 1 surely reminds one of that X-Pan in terms of overall design and ergonomics. It sports a 16 megapixel 16×24 mm sensor, in general somewhat similar to that of the Sony NEX-5N, but – keeping in line with Fuji’s sensor development heritage – with a unique image filter design and no anti-alias filter. The first user reports in the internet – such as Vlad Dodan’s hands-on review and another hands-on short review by Serban Mestecaneanu, both from Romania – indicate that the sensor quality might be really nice and probably the best of all mirrorless cameras to date. Then there is the unique viewfinder system that lets you choose between an optical and an electronic view. Also the lenses seem nice, with the possible exeption of the 18/2 wide-angle of which some rather mediocre image samples have been posted, seriously lacking corner sharpness and showing a lot of false colour on harsh contrast edges. The big question about the Fuji system, however, might be its autofocus performance. Surely it won’t be in the speed category of the current Olympus and Nikon cameras. But also let’s hope it will be accurate enough! The Fuji X-Pro is expected to be priced at €1590 for the body only with the lenses going for around €600 each. This means it’s the most expensive mirrorless camera of them all. Steve Huff came up with an interesting poll that probably indicates what potential customers do think of these prices.

Leica M9P (image: Leica)

And then, there is still Leica, with the mother of all mirrorless camera systems, since 1954. The most current offering is the mighty Leica M9P – find some info about it here on Steve Huff’s blog – with a 19 megapixel CCD sensor. Its the only “mirrorless” camera with the classic 24×36 mm image size. Apart from that, the rangefinder system, as we all know, shines in some areas of reportage, street and landscape photography, while it is unsuitable for macro and longer telephoto lenses. Anyway, a bunch of very exiting lenses are availably in very good, superb and impeccable quality and price levels from Voigtländer/Cosina, Zeiss/Cosina and Leica itself. Even 1950s lenses tend to be of a somewhat better and more consistent quality than a lot of recent lenses for other mirrorless camera systems! Leica also is rumored to introduce an interesting new “system” camera, probably sporting an electronic viewfinder, in 2012, but even the sensor size of that one remains totally unclear at this point. Leica might seem very expensive in comparison to the others, but there’s always the possibility to look for a used Leica M8 and used lenses – this is the advantage of a system that has been around for almost 60 years. After all, the latest Fuji-built camera system, the Hasselblad X-Pan, merely lasted for 8 years.

As for myself, I find the idea of a digital Leica M camera more and more appealing. And for those areas that the Leica can’t cover, such as macro and tele, another mirrorless camera system could fit the bill very well – being much smaller than a traditional DSLR setup. Hmm…..

Mirrorless country is an exiting world, full of different ideas. But also full of stuff where you just can’t help wondering what the hell the manufacturers are thinking. I am very curious what 2012 will bring to the mirrorless camera world.

So this is a shot I took recently with the lens focused to its minimum distance, resulting in a magnification of about a 1:3. That’s really cool. The fly on this shot was just a few millimetres big. And as you can see, the sharpness and the Distagon’s trademark high contrast and freedom of color fringes are retained!

This one's really small! 35/2 Distagon at f/4

100% crop. Click on the image to enlarge.

It’s an amazing achievement that Zeiss designed both that fast aperture and that astonishing close-focus ability into this one single lens – at a time where only standard spherical glass elements were available and also no “floating elements” were used in the focusing mechanism. Those were to be introduced first by Nikon in 1968 with their Nikkor 24/2.8 super wideangle lens: When focusing, the front lens elements would move relative to the rear ones, instead of that all the lens elements are just moved as a whole forward or back.

The 35/2 Distagon is, therefore, the absolute climax of really classic, if you want so, pure and basic, lens design. Now you have to realise that especially those floating elements are not just a gadget but rather a very useful, important achievement in giving a lens equally great performance both for very distant as well as for very close subjects. With that in mind, it is absolutely clear that the close-focus quality of the 35/2 just has to be somewhat compromised. To find that out, I gave it a little test.

The performance test with a 1:160 scale model loco

I chose a 1:160 N scale Minitrix model loco to take a shot that probably would not look too boring but could still be used as a kind of lens performance test. The model is about 10 centimetres long and full of any kind of really small details. To get it on the picture, I had to focus to about 0.32 m – please note that this reading is probably not 100% accurate due to the lens being used on the Kipon Contarex-NEX adapter on the NEX-5. The preview images will already be bigger than life size, even when you read this post on a 13″ or 15″ notebook display.

I did all my best to align the lens really correctly to not introduce any focus errors on the left and right of the frame. But of course it’s not laboratory conditions here. Same goes for the lighting, well, yes: A single 20 watt halogen desk lamp directed to the ceiling, the camera set up on a tripod where it would record a full 30 seconds at f/11 – erm, so what! That’s it.

This was taken with all apertures from f/4 to f/11 – anything more open really would be just too shallow a depth of field for this subject in my opinion – and you can download all these pictures at full resolution below for your personal evaluation!

This time, I decided to leave all settings for sharpness, contrast and noise in Lightroom at their default settings. As the NEX-5 only can shoot at ISO 200 and I also had to bump up the shadows of that dark model loco a bit in post, you will see some noise this time and not the same biting sharpness that, this time, would need some additional effort – not just a simple overall sharpening and de-noise adjustment – in post processing.

58 1436. 35/2 Distagon at f/4.

58 1436. 35/2 Distagon at f/5.6.

58 1436. 35/2 Distagon at f/8.

58 1436. 35/2 Distagon at f/11.

As you can see, there is corner sharpness missing and even f/8 is not perfect in that respect. This is just what you would expect given the “ridig” lens design without floating elements. But, hey: It’s not a dedicated macro lens. It’s just a fast – in its day, even a super-fast – wide-angle that was given that additional amazing close-focus ability in case you’ll really need it. If you require it to do so, it gets the job done, and it always gives you an image with a quality look and feel to it. That’s what this lens is all about.

And as you can see, closing down it does sharpen up nicely. The center of course is crisp at the more open aperture settings as well – also see that 100% crop of the fly above. An impressive overall performance that this very impressive lens gives, even when pushed so hard to its limits. Oh and before I forget it: There’s no distortion correction applied to the shots above. Freedom from distortions makes images that much cleaner to look at! In the 1960s, you would not correct weird distortion with a few lazy clicks in your RAW converter, instead it was yet another quality aspect that had to be designed right into the lens. Again, that’s just what the Zeiss Distagon 35/2 was about.

By the way, close-focusing 35s became somewhat of a fashion in the 1960s. As an example, the Eastern German 35s from Zeiss Jena – the Flektogon 35/2.8 and its successor, the 35/2.4 – would even focus down to 0.18 metres. All this was amazing stuff back in those days – and as you can see the pictorial and technical quality, when used within reasonable parameters, is still top-notch even today – and it made best use of the possibilities that a SLR system camera gave over all those earlier mighty rangefinders.

(If you wonder about the background in the shots above: It is a small part of one page of Nick Brandt’s amazing book “A Shadow Falls” comprising of black&white, really epic Eastern African photographs.)

2011 has proven to be an exciting year for all those interested in the new mirrorless camera systems. Finally, after all that time, Olympus has managed to come up with some really nice lenses for their Micro Four Thirds system, proving how much potential and quality can be achieved with such small cameras. See how you can build yourself a perfect Micro Four Thirds camera and lens kit for $2500 here at stevehuffphoto.com!

Now that the NEX-7 and a few new lenses have been launched, why not think about a Sony NEX system for the same kind of money? The shopping list is short and sweet – surely not to everyone’s taste, yet probably just right for some of us!

Sony NEX-7 with Zeiss 24/1.8.

Sony NEX-7 – €1199

An ultra high resolution 24x16mm sensor; “tri navi” control with three direct adjustment wheels eliminating most needs to press a button or dig in the menu for crucial settings; the new OLED high-performance electronic viewfinder plus tiltable rear screen – all this concentrated in just 291 grams: The NEX-7 looks to be one of the hottest cameras ever since digital replaced celluloid in photography regarding concept, design and performance!

NEX-7.

Sony 24/1.8 “Zeiss” – €999

This is an exciting new lens offering the classic 35 mm field of view and hopefully superb optical quality. Look at the first online samples such as here (that one apparently was shot at f/2.8!). Also really cool is the 16cm close focusing range!

Sony NEX-7 with Zeiss 24/1.8.

Sony 50/1.8 OSS – €349

A short portrait telephoto lens (75 mm field of view) with enough speed and built-in optical stabilisation. Again: The first online samples such as this one look very promising.

Sony NEX-7 and 50/1.8 OSS.

That’s it! Just one camera body, two top-notch lenses that cover the classic 35 and 75 field of views – all together for €2547 list price. (When all that stuff finally makes it to the stores probably at the beginning of 2012, you should be able to get it just under €2500.)

It’s a lot of money. For Sony, after all. But still it could be the best high quality compact camera system out there in 2012 – for a certain kind of photographer. Probably not a premier choice for action stuff, but just perfect for landscapes, travel, reportage, and much more. Let’s face it: So far, no other manufacturer bothered with designing a camera body that really comes close to the NEX-7. It’s really a novelty on the market and that is not just because it’s the “fastest” or the “best quality” or whatever else – but rather an intriguing new mix of very traditional and very modern elements that could lead to an entirely new class of high quality cameras in the next couple of years.

You’ve got some budget left over for a third lens?

Sony 30/3.5 Macro – €249

How about this one? It looks rather dull and boring: Only f/3.5 and a somewhat lame 30 mm focal length. But see it from a different point of view: It’s cheap, it’s super small (for a 1:1 macro lens, that is – they say that it even comes with internal focusing throughout the whole range!), first samples again look very nice and the lame focal length might just be perfect for some folks: After all, the 45 mm field of view makes for a very nice, slightly wide standard lens!

Sony NEX 30/3.5 Macro.

Please keep in mind that, for now, none of all these have been shipped to end customers (I believe a few 30 macros are already sold on some markets as of October 2011). You should be able to get all that stuff in early 2012, which leaves you with some time to save up for all this.

The very first reviews of the Sony NEX-7 camera have just appeared, but full-size RAW samples are still scarce as most professional RAW converters don’t yet support the camera (again, as of October 2011). You can find a selection of full-size sample pictures taken with the Zeiss 24/1.8 and Sony 50/1.8 (on the 16 megapixel NEX-5N) here at lenstip.com to give you an impression of the lenses’ performance. Please note that this link also will show you samples of several other Sony cameras and lenses, so watch out.

All images shown in this post are officially released Sony press shots.

Some info on the Zeiss Contarex Sonnar 135/2.8

Sony NEX-5 with Zeiss Contarex Sonnar 135/2.8.

The 135/2.8 was introduced in 1964 to the Contarex lineup, following its little f/4 brother that was available right from the system’s launch. It is a classic design with 4 lenses in 4 groups, according to pacificrimcamera.com and no special glass. It focuses down to 1.2 metres. You get the same ultimate mechanical quality of all Contarex lenses.

Now 40-50 years old, these lenses can fail due to sticky focusing mechanisms or lens separation but find yourself a really good shop such as classic-camera.de and almost every lens can be brought back to as-new condition with ultimately silky smooth focusing. With any Contarex lens, there is never any looseness in the lens barrels, and the quality of the materials is just second to none in the world. It’s not just “hey this is metal” – but the quality of the materials used and the precision with which all is finished and put together must be seen and felt in person to believe it.

Okay I already said all that in my entry about the Distagon 35/2, didn’t I? So let’s move on. How is the optical quality of the Sonnar?

A word on image processing

I never ever shoot JPG, but only RAW. I just prefer RAW because it’s much more convenient to adjust colours, contrast, and the whole look of the image to my liking in Lightroom – instead of relying on the camera and fiddling with camera settings more than necessary while shooting. Apart from these settings, the images posted here have been saved as JPG in Lightroom with the following parameters: Sharpness: +60 (a bit above standard), Radius: 0,5 (minimum setting), Details: +25 (standard setting), Masking: +5 (a bit above standard), Luminance noise reduction: +20 (a bit above standard). Everything else sharpness and detail related is on standard. To show you the true lens performance, there is no distortion, no vignetting and no CA correction applied.

Okay, so what about the optical quality?

Being a classic design with no low-dispersion or apochromatic elements, this surely shows in the results you get with the 135 Sonnar. Also, competition today is fierce, with a world of really high-performing telephotos out there – even some absolutely astonishing zooms.

Overall, I have to admit that I am not that “wow” about the Sonnar’s results as I was about the Distagon. But before you get me wrong: It’s ultimately sharp across the whole frame – please keep in mind that the NEX only has a 24×16 mm sensor – at least from f/4 onwards and even at f/2.8 the sharpness leaves nothing to be really desired. I have seen quite some classic 135s that are not up to that level of biting sharpness. At f/5.6 or f/8 it is just perfect.

See the following samples for yourself. I really can’t always remember if I used f/5.6 or f/8 but it does not matter at all: The performance is just the same at both these apertures. I did not bother to try f/11 as there’s no reason to do that – most likely diffraction effects will start to decrease the performance at this setting.

Cologne-Deutz. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6 or f/8.)

Ferris wheel in Deutz. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6 or f/8.)

Unintended wrapping art. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6 or f/8.)

(135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6.)

Self. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/4.)

The trouble of this classic 135 are the color fringes on details with harsh contrast which are very apparent at f/2.8 and even, to some degree, at f/4. This, after all, is the reason why they invented apochromatic glass for telephoto lens designs.

Here’s a comparison of f/2.8, f/4 and f/5.6. Again, there’s no reason to ever stop the 135 Sonnar further down as f/5.6, apart from you probably needing the extra depth of field, depending on the image subject.

Please don’t judge this comparison for edge sharpness as these leaves tend to be not all in one single focal plane.

Leaves. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/2.8.)

Leaves. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/4.)

Leaves. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6.)

Regarding sharpness, the Sonnar just delivers. The following one was shot at f/4. As you also can see, it really depends on the subject if any color fringes are visible.

Bridges in Cologne. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/4.)

Okay, so here’s another comparison of f/2.8 and f/4 – both for the quality of the background blur, and also again showing the color fringes of a demanding backlight subject.

On a sad note, the Sonnar 135/2.8 again is a lens in the Zeiss Contarex lineup that is spoiled by its cheapo six-bladed aperture, just as the otherwise iconic Distagon 35/2 – but not as the Sonnar 50/2. This is even more sad given the fact that especially 135mm lenses are all about bokeh and background blur. But you probably are just going to use it wide open at f/2.8 for that kind of stuff, anyway.

Fallow land. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/2.8.)

Fallow land. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/4.)

So there you have it. It has to be said that some of the color problems could be ironed out in post. The 135/2.8 Contarex Sonnar is a sharp and well-performing lens. But, you did expect that from a lens of this heritage, didn’t you? I guess it’s ultimate perfection from a 1964 point of view. It’s just that the design does show its age much more than the Distagon 35/2 did.

Compare this to a modern apochromatic 135 – and be it the 135/2L from Canon – at open apertures, and it won’t have any chance. (Well, give the Canon also some 40 years of use and then it will be interesting to see how these two compare after that time.)

Red land. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/4.)

A cruise on the Rhine. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6 or f/8.)

On the other hand, there still is a lot speaking for the Sonnar. It’s compact, stylish and impeccably well manufactured. As Contarex lenses go, this one is even fairly common with about 8.000 lenses manufactured (again according to pacificrimcamera.com – different sources vary a bit). What that means is that you could get it for not too much money – at least when compared to other classic Zeiss stuff. Prices vary wildly depending on the vendor and lens condition, so I won’t go into more detail here.

What you then get is classic 1960s telephoto lens performance in textbook perfection – even if it is not up to the performance of modern high-end telephoto lenses. Also you get the same kind of rich colors and high contrast that other Contarex lenses such as the Distagon 35/2 show. You can mix pictures of all these lenses just as you want and get results with a uniform, crisp and very modern look to them. Creating a whole lens lineup with that level of uniform high quality – something we’re probably very used to today – was a really big achievement by Zeiss back in the 1950s and 60s.

So the Sonnar 135/2.8 will easily beat a lot of modern lower-end lenses, especially regarding its sharpness, but it won’t have any chance against state-of-the-art apochromatic Leica glass.

Having said all this, the sample shots should clearly show that the Sonnar is able to outresolve the NEX-5 sensor with its 14 megapixels across the whole frame comfortably at all apertures from f/4, probably f/5.6 onwards: The little smearing of details in the green grass of the shot below is probably only caused by me trying to get a really noise-free file with Lightroom set to +20 luminance noise reduction – the NEX-5 can’t be set to ISO 100, after all. If you really care for this level of pixel peeping, hope for the new Sony NEX-7 with its whopping 24 megapixel count, and prepare for careful RAW post processing.

In the end, despite its obvious shortcomings, the Zeiss Contarex Sonnar 135/2.8 is able to deliver the goods. If any shot comes out wrong, it’s never because of the lens. That’s what quality photo gear is all about!

Stunt kites. (135/2.8 Sonnar at f/5.6 or f/8.)

A final word on real-day photography with a manual telephoto

You will notice that all the shots above are very static ones. There is a reason for this: Frankly, it’s a real pain to handle a telephoto lens on a display-only digital camera as the NEX-5 – at least in my experience. As much as I love its “waist-level” tiltable screen for normal photography, it is awful to handle once you put a medium telephoto on it. Manual focusing (if you want to really nail down the shots to 100% per-pixel sharpness) needs a lot of attention – and inevitably also some time, and holding the camera at arm’s length (remember it does not have a viewfinder) gave me some slightly blurry shots even at 1/640 of a second as the camera also lacks in-body stabilisation.

I won’t even bother to try shooting any action apart from that in a retirement home’s park with a setup like this. But it’s perfectly good for static shots and of course the smooth focusing and the amenities of the NEX5′s screen with its clear view as well as its magnification and peaking modes would make it just a dream when shooting from a tripod. It might be that a camera with a viewfinder such as the NEX-5N or NEX-7 will totally change the shooting experience of a classic telephoto. I’m eager to find that out!

All these were made with the little wonder Sony NEX-5 and the big heavy wonder Zeiss Contarex Distagon 35/2 lens – I just love the colors and clarity of that. A marvel. Enjoy!

The Swan. (Hey, finally I got a shot of a swan that's not boring!)

Phone booth art. Gorgeous!

Clearing.

The former GE building.

Another clearing in a little city park.

The Moon over St. Pantaleon.

(Learn more about St. Pantaleon here.)

Being able to use all sorts of classic lenses via adapters is part of the fun of the new breed of mirrorless system digital cameras. With the arrival of high-resolution camera screens and features like Sony’s new focus peaking mode, it’s become more than just “fun”: It has evolved into a very capable instrument for high-quality photography.

Blue and yellow. (35/2 Distagon at f/8.)

Now we all know that especially Sony’s NEX system still lacks quality lenses. They are just about to introduce the first supposedly high-quality lenses, the Zeiss-branded 24/1.8, the 30/3.5 macro and the 50/1.8 with stabiliser, starting in late 2011. Especially the Zeiss 24/1.8 sounds intriguing and the first samples on the net surely look promising.

Sony NEX-5 with Zeiss Contarex Distagon 35/2.

But one single Zeiss lens does not make a complete premium lens lineup. Which brings me back to the adapter stuff. With a nice classic Zeiss Contarex system in my shelf, comprising of a Contarex Super SLR body and three lenses – 35/2, 50/2 and 135/2, adding a Contarex-NEX adapter from chinese specialist manufacturer Kiron really was a no brainer for me. If it works out, I’d have the equivalent of 35, 50, 75 and 200 mm in Zeiss lenses with this lineup, once the new 24/1.8 from Sony becomes available.

The first lens I could try out is the Zeiss Distagon 35/2, which acts like a 50 mm standard lens on the 24×16 mm sensor of the NEX. So here we go.

Some info on the Zeiss Contarex Distagon 35/2

The 35/2 for the fascinating all-over-the-top Zeiss Contarex SLR system hit the market in 1965. At the time, it was the fastest-ever 35 mm lens for any SLR system and the more expensive brother of the 35/4 Distagon. This name was the designation of all the retrofocus lens designs that had become necessary because of the mirror box. It was still kind of a new development in the 50s and 60s.

Like all Contarex lenses, the design, haptics and mechanical quality of the Distagon 35/2 is simply the best you will ever get. Really, no other manufacturer than Zeiss and Leica – especially in the 1960s! – ever offered such exquisitely finished lenses. The lens is all-metal, and even the quality of the alloy is superior to that of more modern lenses. It’s the reason why a properly serviced Contarex lens still feels impeccable and smooth like silk, no matter if it is 40 or even 50 years old. The thing is that not only the quality is top-notch, but even the design of the barrel is exqusite, timeless and often copied in later times. These lenses are even better in this respect than the current Zeiss lens lineup that is manufactured by Cosina in Japan – and no, I am not dissing the already superb new lenses: It’s just that these old ones are just superior to anything else on the planet. You got to hold one in your hands to believe!

Of course, even a Zeiss Contarex lens can break with time and need a service or professional cleaning. And the way they are assembled means that it’s no DIY stuff – unless you really know what you are doing. The impeccable finish is easily damaged by reckless repairs. So beware. If you have found a good copy, however, it will be a lifetime’s companion.

Sony NEX-5 with Zeiss Contarex Distagon 35/2 (and the JJC display hood – excellent!).

A word on image processing

I never ever shoot JPG, but only RAW. I just prefer RAW because it’s much more convenient to adjust colours, contrast, and the whole look of the image to my liking in Lightroom – instead of relying on the camera and fiddling with camera settings more than necessary while shooting. Apart from these settings, the images posted here have been saved as JPG in Lightroom with the following parameters: Sharpness: +60 (a bit above standard), Radius: 0,5 (minimum setting), Details: +25 (standard setting), Masking: +5 (a bit above standard), Luminance noise reduction: +20 (a bit above standard). Everything else sharpness and detail related is on standard. To show you the true lens performance, there is no distortion, no vignetting and no CA correction applied.

Autumn colors in Cologne. (35/2 Distagon at f/2.)

Autumn colors in Cologne. (35/2 Distagon at f/4: Notice different background blur to the shot above.)

The image quality: Well…. “Wow!” is all I really can say!

The Distagon 35/2 entered production in 1965. That means there’s no aspherical lens elements. No T* coating. No special glass, no internal focusing, no floating elements, because all that stuff still had to be developed in future times. It’s just a classic lens design. But a very complex one: 9 lens elements in 8 groups, according to taunusreiter.de (please see that link for a lens diagram). Zeiss paid that much attention to the optical quality. They wanted to create the very best. Also they made sure that all their lenses would deliver the same characteristics regarding the colors and rendition of the image. If you had the complete lens range, you could use them all and your image portfolio would still look absolutely consistent. All this was breathtaking, state-of-the-art stuff in those days!

Classic Opel – 1. (35/2 Distagon at f/4)

Classic Opel – 2. (35/2 Distagon at f/2)

Digital camera sensors are totally unforgiving with their super high megapixel counts and the characteristics of a digital capture device are very different to those of the more forgiving, kind of three dimensional analogue film. A lot of classic lenses suffer from this when used on a digital camera. The Distagon 35/2, however, really yields absolutely impressive results on the NEX-5.

There is one thing that is not perfect and this is the corner sharpness. At f/2, it shows a very clear loss of sharpness to the corners of the image frame. Close the aperture and things improve, and at f/5.6 to f/8 the corners of the frame are really crisp and sharp – provided that they are in focus, of course. So, this lens is not made for the reproduction of flat brick walls *g*.

In every other respect, the Distagon is just astonishing. The image center is freakin’ sharp even fully open! Images are crisp and clear, even in sunlight at open aperture. CA are very low, you could easily correct them in Lightroom with probably a +10 or +15 setting – I’ve seen many lenses that are far worse than that. There’s no color fringing to speak of exept at the harshest high contrast areas. Impressive! The colors that the lens renders are rich and saturated. No matter in which situation, it never ever looks fuzzy or dreamy like so many other classic lenses – in fact, it performs just like a modern-day high end lens. Just amazing considering this is 1960s vintage! The only issue, as said before, is the corner sharpness.

Now Zeiss came up with a new optical formula for the current Zeiss Distagon 35/2 ZF or ZE that is made by Cosina. This one has been tested by photozone.de on a Nikon D200 – again a 24×16 mm sensor:

“Similar to the other tested Zeiss lenses the Distagon 35mm f/2 produces breathtakingly high center resolution figures straight from the max. aperture setting. At f/2.8 and f/4 the center quality matches or exceeds the limits of the 10mp D200 sensor. In contrary the border performance is “only” very good at large aperture settings but increases steadily towards medium apertures where the quality reaches excellent levels.”

Yeah, to me that does sound very familiar to the performance of the classic Contarex Distagon. Another proof how right they got it on their first attempt! Exept that the classic’s corner sharpness is somewhat inferior – but just see and judge for yourself:

Tree. (35/2 Distagon at f/8.)

Autumn colors. (35/2 Distagon at f/5.6.)

Okay … as you can see, there’s not a real reason to worry about corner sharpness with this lens *g* … it rather seems that the lens kind of outperforms the NEX-5 sensor. It’s a good thing that the NEX-7 is around the corner!

For all the other stuff – bokeh, color rendition, clarity, contrast and what else, just have a look at the following images. Yes I have edited them in Lightroom, but not by much: The lens just is that contrasty and clear! Love it!

Autumn sun. (35/2 Distagon at f/2.)

At the skate park. (35/2 Distagon at f/8.)

Stone crocodile. (35/2 Distagon at f/2.)

On the way to the local sub. (35/2 Distagon at f/4.)

Oh and did I already mention the close focus of only 22 centimeters – that’s the distance between your object and the sensor! Again, keep in mind that this is what they came up with in the 1960s!

Some criticism

Okay, here we go: The first thing is that the focussing is really fast. I mean, you barely touch the focus ring and it’s all over the place. Modern-day autofocus lenses are often the same because they want to make sure that the AF motors don’t have to turn that much to speed up the operation. I guess that Zeiss probably had similar thoughts in mind: The 35/2 was meant to be a photojournalist’s lens. And these guys just didn’t want to endlessly turn focus rings like they had to with a pre-war rangefinder Contax, for example.

The second thing – and the one that really annoys me in some occasions – is the primitive six-bladed aperture. It creates not only hexagon shapes in the out-of-focus areas, but also causes highlights – such like light sources in night shots – to look like ugly fat six-pointed blobs. The Planar 50/2, for example, has a much nicer rounded aperture than this. Very sad. And while we are at it: The bokeh is nice, but I’ve seen better. Now you just have to keep in mind that classic 35 mm lenses were never really meant to offer gorgeous bokeh and out-of-focus renderings – no matter if they are used on film or on crop-sized digital sensors. Any 50 mm will always do better than that.

City park colors. (35/2 Distagon at f/2.)

City park colors. (35/2 Distagon at f/2.8.)

Site caravan. (35/2 Distagon at f/8, slightly cropped frame.)

Upshot: A legend alive – see it to believe it!

There you have it: A classic high-end lens that does indeed show some little faults and shortcomings, but overall it feels just totally right and performs absolutely admirably. It’s a beauty of a lens. And its few faults just give it that classic character – the character of a lens that had not been optimised to death to meet some test chart performance targets, but rather a character of solid, impeccable overall image quality.

I don’t know if it would make sense to go out and look for Contarex lenses just to use them on a Sony NEX camera. For a start, they are somewhat big and heavy, especially as the adapter itself is already 28 mm long. From a user’s point of view, you should probably rather consider Leica M, or Cosina-made Zeiss/Voigtländer rangefinder lenses.

For a collector, however, this all is of no concern: Being able to appreciate this classic beauty and enjoy the impeccable images it delivers today – used on cameras that were total science fiction when it was created – is all that counts.