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‹ Photo Notes · 6 května, 2017
At the beginning of March I met representatives of Carl Zeiss AG at the FotoŠkoda Centre and borrowed their three lenses with the Fuji X mount for a test.
More and more brands and lenses for Fujifilm cameras are appearing on the market; FotoŠkoda alone currently offers more than 100. Only one company, and that is Carl Zeiss AG, makes lenses with autofocus (apart from Fujifilm, of course). With all lenses from other brands you have to focus manually.
Photographers don’t faint at the name Zeiss, but the long-standing historical respect is noticeable. No wonder: in 1934, when Fujifilm, today a major global player, was founded, Zeiss was celebrating its 88th birthday (founded 1846) and was already among the biggest and most recognized companies in the field of technology in the world.
Zeiss currently makes three AF lenses with the Fujifilm mount. They are ZEISS Touit 12 mm f/2.8 Distagon T*, ZEISS Touit 32 mm f/1.8 Planar T* and ZEISS Touit 50 mm f/2.8 Planar T*. For about a week I had all three at my disposal.
The ones with the blue dot
The design is the first thing in which Zeiss lenses differ. From everything, not just from Fuji. Even at first glance they look modern and somewhat austere. No reference to tradition or revival of vintage design. Where Fuji lenses have an orange-red rectangular mark for mounting the lens, there is a round dot in the blue company colour.
Focusing speed
Another difference is noticeable the moment you put the camera to your eye. All three Zeisses are slower than any of my Fujinons. I didn’t have to measure it; you can tell. For my more or less static shooting it’s not a problem, but whoever is after maximum speed probably doesn’t need to read on.
Focusing accuracy
If I don’t count small (and my own) errors when shooting wide open, focusing accuracy turned out roughly like this. I should also point out that I didn’t do a focusing accuracy test but shot normally. With each lens I took roughly 150 to 200 photos.
- Zeiss 12 mm – 2 photos focused completely elsewhere
- Zeiss 32 mm – 3 photos focused completely elsewhere
- Zeiss 50 mm – all photos fine
All the focusing errors occurred when shooting with a fully open aperture and lighting with the Dedolight. I remember a situation when the Dedolight was in the backlight position, the 12 mm lens wandered for a while and then evaluated the situation like this.
The number of wrong focuses is negligible, but I’m not used to it. Only the Fujifilm XF 56 mm occasionally behaved similarly for me.
Optical properties
When we were chatting with the Zeiss representatives during the handover of the lenses, they boasted mainly about the optical properties of their lenses. Rightly so. And whoever has read this far will be satisfied; I was. All three Zeisses are nicely sharp and all have excellent colour and contrast rendition. I’ve written several times that I slightly soften photos at web size; this time I didn’t do that for the sake of the article.
The following three photographs are only globally edited/converted to black and white and reduced to 1200×800 px. All were shot with a fully open aperture.
The first photograph was taken with the Zeiss 12 mm.
The second photograph – Zeiss 32 mm.
And the third with the Zeiss 50 mm lens.
There’s nothing to fault in the sharpness. For comparison I did a sharpness comparison test with several Fujinons and photographed a piece of text from the Zbraslav Chronicle. Compare for yourself. (The Zeiss 50 mm is a macro, which is why it appears twice in the test.)
Zbraslav Chronicle – fully open aperture
Zbraslav Chronicle – stopped down
I photographed the text of the Zbraslav Chronicle in aperture priority mode (time and ISO automatic) and the photos are unedited. By the way, thanks to this test I found out that in the article about the Fujinons 23 mm/2.0 and 35 mm/2.0 I made a mistake in judging the sharpness, so I hereby set it straight.
I pushed the wide-angle
Not because it came out the best of the three, but because a 50 mm focal length isn’t very interesting for me and 32 mm is close to my favourite Fujinon 35 mm/1.4. The Zeiss 12 mm/2.8 is two millimetres shorter than my Fujinon 14 mm/2.8, which is why their comparison interested me the most.
I took both for a walk around Vinohrady. I had the other two Zeisses in my pocket as well, but it was so cold that I shot with the twelve only for a while and made the comparison with the fourteen.
Comparison of the angle of view, Fujifilm 14 mm/2.8 vs Zeiss 12 mm/2.8 (aperture 8)
Fujifilm XF 14 mm/2.8
Zeiss 12 mm/2.8
Crop, comparison of details
Fujifilm XF 14 mm/2.8
Zeiss 12 mm/2.8
Two more photos with the Zeiss 12 mm/2.8 … without comment
When I went to return the Zeiss lenses, it occurred to me to make a comparison photo with Samyang lenses too, but I had only a little time, so instead I just compared the angle of view of the short focal lengths (10, 12 and 14 mm + 8 mm fish-eye). Just on the side, since we ended up with these very short lenses. More perhaps next time…
Conclusion
Whoever wants maximum speed, none of the tested Zeiss lenses is for them. Whoever wants maximum quality will get their money’s worth. Zeiss lenses are priced similarly to Fujinons, and more expensive than Samyang. But they offer autofocus and outstanding image quality.
Technical specifications and current prices of the individual lenses can be found here: Zeiss Touit 12 mm, Zeiss Touit 32 mm, Zeiss Touit 50 mm.
Have a nice Saturday, everyone 🙂