Took the plunge, bought the Voightlander 25mm Hyperprime

[Andrew J. Allsbury]

Ok, so I put my pre-order in with Photo Village today, we should have our lens by late April. Can you guys post some interview screengrabs/samples from those of you who have the AF100/Voightlander? Kind of excited...

[mkfotos.com]

You should be, it's a phenomenal piece of glass, for anything even remotely close to its price range.

Very nearly all the interviews here (and lots of the BTS/runway) I shot with it for Charleston Fashion Week (last week), usually wide open, sometimes stopped down no more than f/2. Footage is pretty much raw from camera due to the overnight editing deadline. There's footage from 5DIIs and 7Ds in there too, but it's easy to spot what's not the AF100.


http://vimeo.com/channels/91839#21429328
http://vimeo.com/channels/91839#21454921
http://vimeo.com/channels/91839#21520421
http://vimeo.com/channels/91839#21537552
http://vimeo.com/channels/91839#21704473

[Steve R]

It was my understanding (from multiple sources) that the Voigtlander doesn't really perform well wide open - in both brightness and resolution (i.e. "dull and fuzzy" at f/0.94) - and needed to be stopped down to f/1.4 before it starts to perform.

Can you confirm?

[8string]

From what I saw at Philip bloom's workshop yesterday, where he had a voigtlander,I would agree that u need 2 stop down.

[Steve Kahn]

From what I saw at Philip bloom's workshop yesterday, where he had a voigtlander,I would agree that u need 2 stop down.

True but this is true of pretty much every lens out there. You don't have to stop down much. By f1.4 it is very sharp.

[Steve R]

True but this is true of pretty much every lens out there. You don't have to stop down much. By f1.4 it is very sharp.

Not true of the Nikon AF 28mm f/1.4; top performance, even wide open at 1.4.

(...although you're right, this is probably a rare exception)

[Rolf Silber]

Have a look how it performs at 1.1. under rather rough conditions.

For the price it's imho unbeatable currently. It's a bit more weak at 0.95 but still usable.

It's extremely well build and it focusses down to 0.17 meters. So you have kind of a macro too.

http://www.vimeo.com/18029741

[Barry_Green]

It was my understanding (from multiple sources) that the Voigtlander doesn't really perform well wide open - in both brightness and resolution (i.e. "dull and fuzzy" at f/0.94) - and needed to be stopped down to f/1.4 before it starts to perform.

Well, it depends on what you mean by "perform". Does it perform better, sharper etc. at 1.4 vs. .95? Yes, definitely. Does it perform infinitely better at .95 than any other comparable lens? Yes, because there are no comparable lenses. You have to spend $10,000 for a Leica Noctilux to get that kind of performance. The .95 of the Voigtlander is, by all reports, much better than the .95 of the Noktor.

Finally, you have to question whether you're talking about "performing" for stills or video. I would presume that the sharpness loss is far more perceivable in stills than it is in video. It gets a little softer at .95, but for video, it's really not much. The contrast/flattening is more noticeable than the softness is.

I posted a comparison of the f/.95 at all f-stops in the AF100 section somewhere, so you can see (at comparable light levels) exactly how the lens differs.

I guess it all comes down to what you're looking for. I think that it performs very well at .95 and if you need .95 there's nothing within a hundred miles of it. And while it performs very well at .95, it performs spectacularly from 1.4 on. It's not like it's a case of "up to 1.4 it's good, but at .95 it's not", it's more a case of "this is a frickin' amazing lens, it just gets a little softer and flatter at .95 but it's still really good for .95."

[Osslund]

The Voigtlander 25 at 0.95 is sharp enough for the AF and sharper than the other nokton Voigtlanders.

[Andrew J. Allsbury]

Thanks for all the great input/samples guys! I didn't know you could set the fstop to 1.1? I thought it skipped from 0.95 to 1.4, could someone please confirm that this lens can be set at 1.1?