Zeiss announces pricing & availability of Touit lenses for mirrorless cameras

I think ideally all lenses should have large front elements compressing the light to small (and light, for fast AF) focusing groups, so they all should have the form like that. It is just the front element of this one is actually small (which is expected from relatively slow WA lens). If the front element would be bigger to almost cover the front, the lens could have been f/2, within the same dimensions.

Even if a lens like this does not have "major barrel distortion, heavy vignetting, and are very soft away from the center", the corners will be distorted (pulled), and subjects farther away much smaller than they are in normal perception. And I like WA, just a little tired of all those shots in 4:3 and 3:2 which should have been 2+:1, with land and sky completely overwhelming the tiny strip of what could have been an interesting and beautiful vista if it were actually visible (I am not generalizing, sometimes the land and the sky ARE the subjects, but rarely).

Check m4/3 stellar panasonic 7-14mm, which is even wider - 14mm FF eq. So 18mm eq. is actually quite nice.

@Xellz, the fact is even those dark lenses have good resolution, at the end of the day you still get not as good images because noises destroy the resolution (or resolution goes with noise reduction whatever).

have a look at DxOMark lens tests and compare the results of a same lens on different cameras of different noise levels and you can see it. why 4/3" is not a practical option for serious photographers.

Not all serious photographers use high ISO, especially with UWA. Point here is, level of m4/3 lenses is a lot higher and bigger choise than on nex and fuji only starting, choice is really small.

And btw, m4/3 used by serious photographers for pro work in various fields.

Some people just like the extra wide effect for it's surrealness and dramatic look. Great for sunsets or water motion. It's very popular for landscapes right now, especially with a mixture of foreground and background elements. This has been common since the 10-22mm range zooms on APS-C DSLRs became popular, and why fuji has a zoom in that range on their roadmap.

Exactly. There are good reasons makers are going to digital correction of CA and geometric distortion. Most CA is simple to adequately correct digitally and painful to eliminate optically, often introducing worse problems. Simple barrel and pincushion distortion are easy to fix, but if you try to solve the barrel distortion and end up with less pronounced mustache distortion, is that better? If it varies in shape with focal length or focus it can be very tough to fix.

I had the impression that if you correct distortion the image becomes softer...

"In the glass" means plain good optics, instead of software chicanery. And that's what one expects from the name and price.

It depends. Sony and Fuji cameras and lens have different mounts and thus lens aren't interchangeable. But Panasonic and Olympus use the same mount, Micro 4/3 (m43), and thus you can share lenses between both brands. For sure some lens features would be lost but they are relatively minor and not critical. For example, Oly m43 lens on Pana bodies won't have any image stabilization since Pana implements it optically in the lens and Oly implements it in the camera body. Similar differences will be in certain optical corrections that each body implements differently. AF speeds and behavior will be also somewhat different.

I think 12/2.8 may be slightly better than XF14/2.8 (if we ignore the difference of angle of view), and 32/1.8 is not as good as 35/1.4 (which I think is between so-so and good).

"but the relative dimensions of the objects in the frame that are similar to the human eye"

That's exactly what perspective means.

Den Sh: Actually, there's a bit more to perspective than the perception of dimensions. There's also the position of the eye relative to the objects. A standard lens compresses perspective in the horizontal and vertical planes, either compared to the human eye or a wide-angle lens. So it doesn't render quite the same perspective as the human eye. The relative distance of the objects, however, emulates what we perceive, though it is debatable exactly which focal length comes closer to the human eye - some say it's 50mm (in 35mm terms, n. b.), some say it's 45mm.

@yabokkie First of all the 50mm 1.8 only sharpens up in the corners from around F4 (ideally f5.6) so that's pretty poor "total light" as some people here like to quote, and how exactly is a $100 lens mounted on a $2000 camera is better value than a $900 lens mounted on a $800 camera?

Yabokkie, 50mm lenses are much easier to design. whether its for crop of not.

Dont get lens design and crop factor mixed up.

@yabokkie Where are you getting your performance data for the zeiss from?

In French, "Touit" have the same pronounciation like the "Twi" from Twitter.

It's a European thing. Leitz and and Durst, among others had a long history of making up new words including the notorious Leica close-up device,"nooky hesum". And "poison" in German is "gift".

@klopus - "Steve, Zeiss is proudly and historically German company. Why should they name their lenses so that it is convenient for Americans?"

I'm not talking about what is convenient for anybody, I'm talking about the unbelievable stupidity of calling a product "twit". Maybe you don't know, it means idiot. I would have expected better of Zeiss's marketing department.

@AbrasiveReducer - " And "poison" in German is "gift"."

I once had the pleasure of explaining to a customer that his product, called xxxxxx Mist in English, needed another name for the German market. Google translate: http://translate.google.com/#de/en/mist

APSC will not disapear for the simple reason the we need a triple set of sensors. FF has some problems with DOF, and still today that difference in picture quality is not justifying the price they ask for it. In some way a FF camera should cost 100$ more than any apsc DSLR. That is the price difference in material and development of a FF sensor. Now, for those who seek in depth sharpness, we need sensors able to do this. The 1 series sensor we find in Sony RX100 and in NIkon 1 series is the basic smaller sensor that is able to deliver correct IQ that can compete with the larger sensors and the ISO range they offer. Then comes the APSC turnaround and 4/3 nonsense. I say nonsense because in my view it is just a way to show others that we, do something of our own.

@Infrared ... Oops ... I see your smiley ... so you and @dpLarry appear to have correctly interpreted my comment ...

as far as I know, the last time Zeiss did anything real was in the 1970s when they coated lenses in Japan. but their T* performed about the same as early Pentax smc and soon Japanese makers started to coat the lenses themselves with better quality than T* but under the same T* brand name. funny things did happen and are still happening.