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Tuesday, June 01, 2004
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Carl Zeiss 45mm f/2.0 T* Planar vs Canon EF 50mm F/1.4 USM. I've gotten some emails asking how the Carl Zeiss 45mm f/2.0 stacks up against the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM. The difficulty of comparing the two lenses is that what I would have to compare them on two very different mediums.
I use the Zeiss 45mm f/2.0 on a Contax G1 Autofocus Rangefinder, using consumer grade film, while the Canon 50mm f/1.4 on a EOS Digital Body (10D). The ability to zoom to 100% in digital allows dissecting of a lens' good qualities from it's flaws, where prints taken from the G1/45mm are bound to look sharp and contrasty in 4"x6". Since i'm not a professional, nor a professional reviewer, i'd like to point out that none of following is purely objective.
Some info on the two:
The Carl Zeiss 45mm f/2.0 was introduced with the Contax G1 AF Rangefinder in 1994. Based on the Classic Zeiss Planar design, it has 6 elements in 4 groups, T* anti-reflective coating and produces images with excellent contrast and color reproduction. It has a 4.7 Photodo rating (out of 5), but unfortunately, I cannot find any MTF charts.
Pros: Excellent Sharpness, dark contrast and great color reproduction, all of which is consistent edge to edge. Resistance to flare is good and excels at f/2.8 and smaller (although wide open is very usable). No noticable CA problems. Built like a German designed, Japanese made tank.
Cons: Screw in hood, no half stops available on aperture ring. Zone/Manual Focusing a pain in the ass (more of a Contax G-System limitation than the lens). Bokeh is generally good, but specular highlights can be rendered polygonal.
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The Canon EF 50mm F/1.4 USM is a guassian design with 7 elements in 6 groups. It utilizes Canon's Micro-USM motor, which is gear driven, as opposed to the Ring-Type USM. Although it's relatively silent in focus and allows full time manual focus, I don't believe it's any faster than the cheaper 50mm F/1.8 which uses an AFD motor. Generally speaking, this is probably my favorite lens because of the image quality from f/1.4 and smaller. This lens has a Photodo rating of 4.4 and the MTF charts can be found here.
Pros: Excellent bokeh, sharpness, color reproduction and contrast. One caveat however, because of the 1.6x crop multiplier of the 10D, EF lenses attached to the 10D will use mostly the center of the image circle of a lens, making edge/corner flaws less noticable. Micro-USM focus is fairly silent and it is light lens. Flare resistance is good, no CA problems and uses a bayonet type hood.
Cons: Not true Ring-Type USM, so focus speed isn't any faster than AFD. Not internal focussing. Even though it outpaces most "L" lenses in quality, it isn't built like one.
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Comparison:
Sharpness - The winner would have to go to The Canon on this one, but only by a hair.
Contrast - I have reason to believe that the Zeiss resolves better contrast. Since the 10D lets you adjust image parameters, I typically leave contrast at 0 to help with blown highlights, leaving it up to me to adjust the contrast to my liking in Photoshop.
Color Reproduction - Both exhibit great color reproduction.
Field Curvature/Coma/CA - Both show no signs of problems with any of these.
Flare Resistance - Both are quite good and better than any consumer zoom.
Vignetting - The Canon shows no vignetting wide open (on the 10D, which means it probably does and I just don't capture it), but the Zeiss shows some wide open.
Performance Wide Open - The Canon wins in my opinion. However, because of the razor thin DOF at f/1.4, it can be a little tricky with the focus system of the 10D.
Performance Stopped Down - As expected, both are excellent stopped down.
I'll leave out any comparisons on ergonomics, as it's more system specific than lens specific.
The Lowdown:
What you'd expect: They're both good. Damn good even. I wish I could of thrown a Nikon/Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 or a Leica Summicron 50mm f/2.0 in the mix, but ultimately, i'm mortal and have bills to pay.
The 0.3 differential in weighted averaged Photodo scores isn't really any indication that the Zeiss is 6% better. The 50mm focal length is the most studied, most improved and also the easiest to produce, so it should be no suprise that every optical manufacturer makes an 50mm lens of superb quality.
posted by HZA | 3:35 PM | email | archive
