FS7: Looking for a Better Quality 18-105mm Zoom

I think the RED 17-50 is no longer made- have to buy used. My understanding is it was a rehoused sigma or something similar.

I think that a lot of this conversation has been misplaced, First - how is it that people can be suggestiing what kind of camera os necessary when all you know about the job is how much the client sells their product for. Basspidg would have to say a lot more about the nature of the shoot if he was even interested in that kind of feedback.

I disagree that it would be neccessary to spend more money on a camera unless you needed the resolution of a Dragon (even an Epic) or an F65. Then yes that's the best option. My understanding is that generally the advantage of more expensive glass depends on what you are shooting. In most cases you probably won't see that much difference between an F55 and an FS7 unless the global shutter or the expanded color gamut came into play. If you're doing a commercial where they're very uptight about color of the product maybe F55/65 would be better?
What's the budget? If the skies the limit well... But I doubt it is here , then I would budget for a good crew and gear before spending on a better camera than an FS&

Straight resolution is probably going to be fine with many DSLR lenses and probably comparable to expensive Cine glass.

However I've never seen a still lens that didn't have longitudinal CA - i.e green magenta fringing on high contrast edges just in front of and behind the plane of focus. That's something you won't find on glass that costs 10 times as much. Does that matter? It depends on the shot. I've rarely seen it on a paid job, but I always see it just shooting lens tests in my living room on edges of lamp shades - ALWAYS - unless I use PL glass then its gone.

2nd issue is that you'll have longer and more accurate focus throw. That may or may not matter on your shots.

3rd issue is only applicable for zooms - Most cine glass is par focal. Now on an FS7 where you can't adjust the backfocus that might be pointless as the lens might be out anyway.

So last is the "je ne said quoi" - Does the lens or camera have just some special quality .... Probably depends what your shooting. A lot of people love Cooke lenses, or Leica or Master primes. But you can rent that with the FS7. Its also likely that there would just be a special extra touch from an Alexa. But its not definite that a more expensive camera is what he needs for any particular shoot. Sounds like he wants to buy a camera for a variety of uses.

Its quite possible that you could do a great job on an FS7 especially if you rented some really nice PL glass.

Lenny
 
I think a lot of the big-sensor craze is hyperbole at the moment, and once things settle a little in the next year or two, people are going to come to their senses and return to 2/3" cameras for shoots that requires the particular optical flexibility you can get with 2/3" zooms. The new Varicam will hopefully help restore some sanity on that front.

It's all horses-for-courses. I've just sold my set of Zeiss CP.2s and have had to stretch myself as far as I can possibly reach financially, to upgrade to a pair of the new Zeiss CZ.2 Compact Zooms. Why? Because I work in the S35mm world, but need the speed on set that only zooms can offer. Still lenses and dinky, unrepeatable focus pulls are simply not an option for the work I do, so I've had to fork out more cash than I ever have before to get the tools that will work for me. If I were shooting sit down interviews most of the time, those advanced lens mechanics wouldn't be necessary, and I could make do with vastly cheaper stills lenses and be happy there.

I think we'd all do well to calm down a bit, and simply be realistic about what our particular shooting needs are. We can't all afford everything, so it's important to be realistic about the specific tools that we do need for the particular work and budgets we each work within.
 
I have a wide range of uses for my FS7. The 4K capabilities will serve well to shoot demonstration footage for my friend's high end home theater demonstrations.. he says he needs 4K footage. I'm going to give him that.

Other uses will be street video, events, concert shoots. It will be a pleasure to finally see the first violins in their black and white tuxes without any purple and green lines along their lapels. That was so aggravating with the 1/2" lenses from Fujinon. I even sent them a print in 2008 and they didn't understand the problem, even with the circles and arrows pointing out the areas where there was color and shouldn't be.

I'm a one man band and will likely always be. Don't have a budget like that unless a miracle happens.

I looked at the Sigma 18-35 lens that the GL Optics is based on. DPReview had a series of tests on it. The sample images were all it took to turn me right off. Geometric distortion was bad, but the CA was really bad--much worse than my Sony 18-105 that I'm planning to return because it has too much CA. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it's still a pig.

I looked at some 4K test footage from a RED 18-50 and could not see any CA. The image was a bit soft, but otherwise, no eye-catching distortions.

Maybe I'll wait for a RED 17-50 that is in better condition.. the one I looked at today looked pretty beat up and the seller was afraid I wouldn't be happy with its performance.

I ordered a 16mm prime yesterday. If I can't find a decent zoom, I'll just use a bunch of primes. It's a pain in the neck changing lenses in the field, but maybe Sony will deliver something on the par with the fabulous 28-135, a lens that seems too good to be true, but there it is. A lens of that quality and mechanical operation precision, but wider, would be the perfect companion lens for indoor shoots. The 28-135 is fine for outdoors. A faster lens that is wider, would be ideal for indoors. The RED lens could fit this niche, but perhaps I'll wait and see what Sony has coming. The 28-135 spoiled me. Some people are comparing it to $30K lenses, because of the image quality and parfocalness. It produces the 'perfect' images I've been seeking ever since I got my Pentax Spotmatic in 1966.

I doubt that big sensors are a craze. Physics demands larger photosites for dynamic range. And I frankly like the idea of shallow depth of field. Besides looking nice, and helping to direct the viewer to a subject by pulling focus, the bokeh background is a lot easier to encode and makes for better quality online videos and less compression artifacts for Blu-ray. I don't think it's going away. 3D may be a fad, but big sensors are here to stay. I almost blew $3K on a Letus 35mm adapter for my EX3, but am glad I didn't! Couldn't afford to lose another stop of light sensitivity. The FS7 is a huge evolutionary step that solves all these problems.
 
Grug,
What kind of work are you doing and what kind of situations that forced you to upgrade your lenses?

- lenny
 
Basspig - What kind of CA are you seeing
Green magenta longitudinal CA around the focus point or Red Blue on the edges of the frame?

If the former, you will see it less on softer lenses and at smaller irises. The 18-105 is f4 while the 18-35 is f1.8. Also the 18-35 os an extraordinarily sharp piece of glass.
I tried a number of Zeiss ZF 35mm f1.4 lenses a few years and sent them all back for longitudinal CA. It is widely praised for its incredible sharpness, but that just created terrible CA, so the f2 older softer version was much cleaner of CA - though neither was great.
 
I seen phenomenal 4K footage shot on the Sigma 18-35mm.

I still say the Contax Zeiss 28-85 and the 35-135 on a speedbooster is your best bet though. Worth buying to test as you can sell them for what you paid for them.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Basspig - What kind of CA are you seeing
Green magenta longitudinal CA around the focus point or Red Blue on the edges of the frame?

If the former, you will see it less on softer lenses and at smaller irises. The 18-105 is f4 while the 18-35 is f1.8. Also the 18-35 os an extraordinarily sharp piece of glass.
I tried a number of Zeiss ZF 35mm f1.4 lenses a few years and sent them all back for longitudinal CA. It is widely praised for its incredible sharpness, but that just created terrible CA, so the f2 older softer version was much cleaner of CA - though neither was great.
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I see a lot of red/blue on the outer portions of the frame. Here's the sample:

http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/sigma-18-35-1-8/samples/iq/IMG_9562-acr.jpg

I don't know what voodoo Sony put into their 28-135, but it's visually perfect and has none of this artifact. I still hold out hope that they are working on something of comparable build quality for the wider end.
 
Hmmm ....
I do see what you're talking about and it does look like classic CA.
I didn't really test mine carefully, just went by very good reviews and it looked good on trial around the house. Did you take that shot , or where diid you find it?

lenny
 
It seems likely to me that the 28-13
28-135 'voodoo' you're referring to might have something to do with the Sony lens compensation. Perhaps they've just taught the fs7 how and where the lens
lCA manifests, and are digitally correcting it before recording. Any thoughts? Jason
 
Nikon 24-120 f4

small and light, good range.

covers FF so will work with sb. But for my docu-work I have always felt that 24mm on a s35 chip is about as wide as I want to go except for some indoor stuff.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Grug,
What kind of work are you doing and what kind of situations that forced you to upgrade your lenses?

- lenny
Click to expand...

I'm shooting predominantly indie narrative, with an increasing volume of commercial/branded-content work. Very few of those jobs have luxurious budgets, and all have particularly tight schedules. When having a second camera & operator on set is rarely an option, having the ability to finesse framing without lens changes/tripod moves etc. can go a long way towards making my days on those shoots.

I've also been finding myself pushing the limits of what I could achieve with the CP.2s. I love that glass and the images it's given me, but on some of the lenses, CA handling wide-open on high contrast scenes wasn't great, and was limiting my DoF options a bit on more extreme lighting setups.
 
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basspig said:
I see a lot of red/blue on the outer portions of the frame. Here's the sample:

http://www.dpreview.com/lensreviews/sigma-18-35-1-8/samples/iq/IMG_9562-acr.jpg

I don't know what voodoo Sony put into their 28-135, but it's visually perfect and has none of this artifact. I still hold out hope that they are working on something of comparable build quality for the wider end.
Click to expand...

Personally I think you're splitting hairs. In the larger scheme of things, once you shoot motion and the images are displayed at 4K you won't notice the CA as your eyes will be drawn to movement.
Most of the 4K display stuff I see are timelapse sequences shot on DSLRs and they look spectacular.
Take Andrew Geraci's work on House of Cards (4k broadcast on Netflix) his timelapse sequnces are shot on Canon lenses.
 
Thanks Grug,
I'm wondering if you could be more specific about where you've had problems with CA.
I tend to shoot mostly doc, corporate and occasional spots and CA has never raised its ugly head on a paid shoot in a way that bothered me. However I often see it when I test lenses at night in my home and usually around lamp shades.
I would like to shoot more indie feature type material and worry a little on whether low light interiors could get nasty. keep waiting for the director to say - "what the XXXX's that magenta ring around the lamp."
For me the very worst lens I've ever tested was an f1.4 Zeiss 35mm f1.4 . The bubble wrap the lens came in at f1.4 was iridescent. That was virtually unusable and the CP2's should be exactly the same glass. Oddly I've never seen a review of that highly touted glass that even mentioned it.
Are the CP2 zooms any better? Lots more expensive!
 
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So odd. My Contax Zeiss 35mm F1.4 AEG is astonishingly sharp but well controlled, and that has the older T* coatings and the cool ninja star bokeh etc and I'd imagine it would be MORE prone to CA.

Maybe you just got a bad sample? Maybe it even happens with Zeiss and their famed QC department!

Every single film and TV show I watch I study the image and the amount of large-ish budget features and TV shows that have fringing/CA/artefacts is amazing. But ultimately it's not as important as the performance and pushing the story along and really, nobody apart from people like us notice.
 
I know this sounds sacreligious but there is a point where its good enough, sharp enough, CA controlled enough, enough DR, enough resolution etc.
 
That shot is a review on DP Review.

I guess different people have different sensitivity to the issue. My eye goes right to the colors that are 'alien' to the scene. It is a major distraction.

For several days, I thought that Lens Compensation was working to make my 28-135 look better than it seemed, but then I found out it only works to straighted curved lines and only in HD resolution, not 4K. So I turned it off to gain access to features that are disabled with it on. And the image quality didn't degrade, so it is the lens. That image quality is better than I find on many feature films shot with large budgets. Whereas the sample I linked to was more akin to an older Kubrick film image quality. Even if you correct it in post, there's still a loss of resolution.

My Rokinon 12mm prime at f2.0 also produces a stellar image. Most zooms I've tried do not.

28-135 is fine outdoors, but I need a lot wider for indoor work. Faster would help, too.

Fortunately, I can often find sample images for a lot of these lenses. Keep the suggestions coming, but remember that I am biased in favor of cine lenses with at least 100° rotation of the focus ring and hard stops.
 
Ben, I tried 3 different Zeiss ZF f1.4 lenses- all the same. I would buy a Contax in a second if I really thought it was cleaner. However I thought Contax only made an F2 35mm. The f2 ZF is not bad - definitely has CA though. If you don't see CA with still lenses you're not looking in the right place. At wide open aperture simply shoot a resolution chart and slowly roll in and out of focus - you will see magenta and green fringing on either side of the focus point. At night ( again wide open look at lamp shades in your house and check out the magenta and green edges around the shade as you roll through focus. You may need a good 17" monitor to see ethos hough.
 
I'm returning the 18-105 Sony lens.. just printed the RMA papers.

I got a Rokinon 16mm T2.2 Cine prime today. Love it. It's much bigger than the 12mm prime and has geared rings for focus and iris and a generous rotation range that makes focusing easy to nail. Like most lenses, the focus point varies more quickly at the distant end then at the near end of the range, so the rotations per foot is not linear. But with about 120° of rotation, it's got room for precise focus. It's bigger and more business-like than the small 12mm prime. I may replace that small prime with a cine prime.. f2.0 vs. T 2.2 is probably insignificant.. could be the same optics in a better housing. Both lenses make sharp images with modest distortion and are fast, but the cine model is easier to handle and use. The SLR version is too tiny and I have big hands, so my fingers keep getting in the shots when I reach to focus the lens. Not a problem with the larger cine lens.
 
Lenilenapi said:
Thanks Grug,
I'm wondering if you could be more specific about where you've had problems with CA.
I tend to shoot mostly doc, corporate and occasional spots and CA has never raised its ugly head on a paid shoot in a way that bothered me. However I often see it when I test lenses at night in my home and usually around lamp shades.
I would like to shoot more indie feature type material and worry a little on whether low light interiors could get nasty. keep waiting for the director to say - "what the XXXX's that magenta ring around the lamp."
For me the very worst lens I've ever tested was an f1.4 Zeiss 35mm f1.4 . The bubble wrap the lens came in at f1.4 was iridescent. That was virtually unusable and the CP2's should be exactly the same glass. Oddly I've never seen a review of that highly touted glass that even mentioned it.
Are the CP2 zooms any better? Lots more expensive!
Click to expand...


My 35mm T/2.1 CP.2 was certainly the worst offender of the set, but many of the lenses could breakdown when pushed to the limit.

Now to be clear, this is only an issue when pushing to absolute extremes - under the highest contrast situations with the lenses at (or close to) wide-open, where the glass is stressed to the limit. But as my own skills have developed, I've found myself pushing my images to these extremes more and more frequently. And it's that need for high-end performance more frequently that's convinced me to put money into just two lenses instead of having the downpayment for a house.

Here are a couple of examples:

This shot was taken on either the 28mm or 35mm Zeiss T/2.1 CP.2 (I forget which), but it was shot wide-open to create that sense of depth between the actors in the foreground and the tree behind them. This is an exceptionally high contrast situation, and the lens simply couldn't wrangle in CA (magenta fringing contaminates the entire length of the railing and the woman's outline, while green fringing contaminates the outline of the man):

BNykcWG.jpg


I was fortunately able to make this shot somewhat bearable with some very tricky and time consuming colour keying in Resolve, but the end result was still sub par.

Here is another example where CA got in the way:

ZKsscNP.jpg


g4eyMah.jpg


Now these two images are ones that I'm reasonably happy with ultimately, but am disappointed with because I couldn't shoot them the way I wanted due to CA. I had to shoot them at T/5.6 on the Zeiss 85mm T/2.1 CP.2 in order to get rid of the CA that fringed every single one of the bulbs on those Jarag-5 concert lights in the background, which forced me to lose the beautiful separation I had between the models and the background when shot at T/2.1-T/2.8. Being able to shoot at (or close to) wide-open would have given those images a certain 'pop' that would have made me even happier.

So these are the situations where absolute image quality and minimised aberrations matter - when lenses are pushed to the extreme. Now for perhaps 85% of the images I shoot, these weaknesses don't cause any problems, and the images I got from the CP.2s were just delightful. But 15% is a high enough percentage of affected images to demand action in my opinion, hence the new investment.

My hope is that Zeiss round out their Otus line with a 24mm and 35mm f/1.4, and I'll then add a set of those to my kit to act as my 'Superspeeds' when I run out of light for the Compact Zooms (since they handle CA brilliantly, in addition to just making all-round lovely images).
 
That's what I figured. For some reason I also found my 35mm to be the worst. The f2 was fair, the f1.4 horrendous. oddly I had a Nikon zoom - I think it was the 28-70 and the fringing was orange/blue which was far less objectionable. That's the only lens I'e ever seen like that.
 
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