Zeiss Photos

There's just something wonderful about using old manual lenses with a brand-new digital SLR. It's so much fun! While my 40+ year-old ausJena (Carl Zeiss) Pancolar 50/1.8 is not as sharp wide open as I had hoped, my 20-30 year-old CZJ Sonnar 135/3.5 MC is simply astounding!

Here's a link about old Zeiss lenses





Look at this shot to see what I mean:

At 800 pixels wide, it looks like a pretty sharp photo. But this is a 10MP image, and the original size is 3872 pixels wide! Most lenses simply aren't sharp enough to match that resolution, and at 100% magnification on screen, things will look pretty blurry.

But with this amazing 20-30 year-old Zeiss lens, this is what I get at 100%:






At that resolution, this photo still would look very sharp blown up to poster size.

To get this kind of sharpness with a new autofocus lens, I'd have to pay around HK$12000 for the Sony/Carl Zeiss 135/1.8!!! That's on top of the cost of the camera!

So how much did I pay for this kind of quality?

£46.

Simply amazing.

Here's the lens...