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SD1 lens concerns

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MrBlissfly

MrBlissfly

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Hi

Prompted by the price drop of the Sd1 I have revisited here and I must say am really enjoying conversing and learning a thing or to!

Anyway

I am very interested in the Sd1 as it would seem to really suite my needs, I am a simple, slow working, 3 lens guy and a moderate wide / standard / short tele prime set up would do me nicely. Suggested UK retail is still too pricey though.

However this post by Kendal buried in another thread has me a bit worried.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=40642786

From reading various threads here Kendal has extensive experience and if true that an SD1 is unlikely have a standard prime equal to it's sensor or indeed the DP2m then without any other reasonable options it could be a deal breaker for me.
Surely a really good standard prime is not too much to ask?

Wide angle I can understand, corner issues etc but from what I have seen of the 30mm 1.4 I'm not too impressed.

Do other Sd1 users concur?

Richard

P.S. please can we have a DP3m with a 50mm? and a buy all 3 for £1800 deal :-)
--
Formally posting as 'Blissfly'
 
MrBlissfly said:
I am very interested in the Sd1 as it would seem to really suite my needs, I am a simple, slow working, 3 lens guy and a moderate wide / standard / short tele prime set up would do me nicely. Suggested UK retail is still too pricey though.

However this post by Kendal buried in another thread has me a bit worried.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1027&message=40642786

From reading various threads here Kendal has extensive experience and if true that an SD1 is unlikely have a standard prime equal to it's sensor or indeed the DP2m then without any other reasonable options it could be a deal breaker for me.
Surely a really good standard prime is not too much to ask?

Wide angle I can understand, corner issues etc but from what I have seen of the 30mm 1.4 I'm not too impressed.
Click to expand...
The 30mm is not really a landscape lens (though I've used it as such before), 1.4 lenses never are... it's sharp in the middle but not much at the edges, at least on the SD-1. Don't forget it is a DC lens, meant for a smaller image circle than other FF primes.

The 28mm may be OK but I 've not had a chance to try one yet and I don't think there are many sample images around from that lens. I thought Sigma was working on a revised prime in that area but I've not seen any new info on it.

I agree a really strong prime is needed there, but my plan is to simply use a DP-1M or DP-2M for mid-range shots. Then I have only to carry really wide and long lenses.

--
---> Kendall
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kigiphoto/
http://www.pbase.com/kgelner
http://www.pbase.com/sigmadslr/user_home
 
The SD1 is a crop sensor. A prime lens designed for a 135 format sensor should work since you are only using the "sweet spot of the lens."

If you don't want your lens to become an anti-aliasing filter stay away from zooms. I don't know the Sigma lenses but I would concentrate on the newer designed primes. I hear the Sigma 50 mm (1.4 maybe) is pretty good. However, on the SD1 this is really a short tele. Wide field of view lenses on crop sensors has always been an issue as the field of view has to be wider for a crop sensor than a 135 sensor to get the same effect.

Wide field of view lenses are more difficult to design - the wider the more difficult.

Worse comes to worse I hear you can make the Canon lenses work on the Sigma although I don't know about all the functionality of the lenses, but I am sure there
are people that do.

Of course if you have been reading all the cautionary notes on Moire - you might want to consider a lens that would prevent that or stop any lens to f11.5 ;-).

Buy the camera, get the best lens you can find and have fun.

--
Truman
http://www.pbase.com/tprevatt
 
Kendall Helmstetter Gelner said:
The 30mm is not really a landscape lens (though I've used it as such before), 1.4 lenses never are... it's sharp in the middle but not much at the edges, at least on the SD-1. Don't forget it is a DC lens, meant for a smaller image circle than other FF primes.
Click to expand...
I rarely use anything shorter than 85mm for landscape. Take many images and stitch for the panorama. Wider lenses are wide on both planes which means you're generally left with a bucket load of sky and foreground that has to be cropped out.

80mm on the other hand, allows you to concentrate on the main points of the image, limiting the amount of extraneious sky and foreground very nicely. Half a dozen well exposed and carefully aligned 80mm shots, stitched together and you've got a landscape that would leave the single shot 20mm wide angle shot for dead.

But what would I know.
 
The only thing a sub-full frame sensor does is change the field of view, in essence 'cropping the shot'. Why do you think they call it 'crop factor' instead of 'magnification factor'?
--
William Wilgus
 
A lens designed to cover a 135 format sensor if designed correctly will not suffer in fall of in the corners of a crop sensor. The crop sensor will fall in the sweet spot of the - or spot where the lens performs the best of the lens.
Mostly Lurking said:
The only thing a sub-full frame sensor does is change the field of view, in essence 'cropping the shot'. Why do you think they call it 'crop factor' instead of 'magnification factor'?
--
William Wilgus
Click to expand...
--
Truman
http://www.pbase.com/tprevatt
 
edited.

--

To understand photography, you must understand that the experience must be much more important than the result ....
Carlos Roncatti Bomfim
 
zzapamiga said:
The best zoom for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM

The best prime lens for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro
Click to expand...
Correction, the above should really say:

"One of the best best Sigma zoom lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM.

One of the best Sigma prime lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro".
 
DaSigmaGuy said:
zzapamiga said:
The best zoom for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM

The best prime lens for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro
Click to expand...
Correction, the above should really say:

"One of the best best Sigma zoom lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM.

One of the best Sigma prime lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro".
Click to expand...
The best are Zeiss, but they each cost almost as much as the camera.
 
mike earussi said:
DaSigmaGuy said:
zzapamiga said:
The best zoom for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM

The best prime lens for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro
Click to expand...
Correction, the above should really say:

"One of the best best Sigma zoom lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM.

One of the best Sigma prime lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro".
Click to expand...
The best are Zeiss, but they each cost almost as much as the camera.
Click to expand...
Don't know about that, Mike. The two Zeiss lenses I had with my Sony A77 were dreadful. The Zony 16-50 f2.8 was a far better lens and nowhere near the price.

The best lenses I own are the three Leicas. They are brilliant on Leica cameras, of course, and make the NEX series cameras into a useful tool.
 
The normal lens for a format is traditionally defined as a focal length approximately the same length as the diameter of the sensor frame. That focal length sensor relationaship produces a field of view that generally looks "natural" to a human observer under normal viewing conditions compared with lenses with longer and shorter focal lengths which produced a compressed or expanded field of view respectively. That is it results in a field of view that a human would experience.

A normal lens on a 4x5 view camera will produce the same field of view as a normal lens on a 135 format.

On a 135 format the diagonal is 43 mm and the normal lens is considered a 50 mm. On a 6x6 the normal lens is a 80 mm, on a 6x7 it is considered 90 one a 4x5 sheet film camera it is 150mm and on an 8x10 sheet film it is 300.

On an ASP-C camera the diagonal is 30 mm so the normal would be a 28 or 30 mm lens, a lot of people use a 35. Any thing longer will produce a field of view that is equivalent to about 1.5*(focal length) on a 135 format. That is a 50 would on an ASP C sensor will produce the field of view of a 75 on a 135 format camera. That's one of the reasons that wide angle lenses are tough to design for ASP C cameras compared to
135 format cameras.

ttp: theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2007/07/normal-lens-uni.html

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/columns/composition-3.shtml
Mostly Lurking said:
But that doesn't make it a telephoto lens.
--
William Wilgus
Click to expand...
--
Truman
http://www.pbase.com/tprevatt
 
mike earussi said:
DaSigmaGuy said:
zzapamiga said:
The best zoom for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM

The best prime lens for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro
Click to expand...
Correction, the above should really say:

"One of the best best Sigma zoom lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 17-50mm F2.8 EX DC OS HSM.

One of the best Sigma prime lenses for the SD1 is the Sigma 70mm f/2.8 EX DG Macro".
Click to expand...
The best are Zeiss, but they each cost almost as much as the camera.
Click to expand...
Thats another blanket misconception...Many older Contax/Yashica Zeiss lenses can indeed be excellent, even by todays standards, but so are many Canon, Nikon, Voightlander and Leica lenses too. All brands have some gooduns, some not so gooduns, and some that are'nt really good at all...The trick is avoiding the clangers and only buying the gooduns. Lens review sites like photozone.de can be usefull in determining which lenses are better than others but they certainly are'nt perfect because they often ommit to test older manual focus versions which because of their much lower price, are more popular than ever.

BTW, Zeiss also makes cheap budget-quality optics for mass produced items like camera phones and camcorders so lens brand is not an automatic guarentee of lens quality these days.

For instance, even some very expensive Leica optics are decidedly ropier than others and generally speaking, the newest Leica models are the better performers. Indeed some of the newer ZF/ZS/ZE range of Zeiss lenses out perform older C/Y versions, too mostly because some had had optical revisions made using the latest optical design software, with positive results.
Trying to find good lenses really is a minefield!
 
Hi

Your description is pretty much my understanding as well (and all the text books I've read).

However in the strictest sense a 50mm is not a telephoto as this denotes a particular lens design and I don't think that is the ways 50's are designed, a long lens on APSC would be a more accurate description I feel.

Crop factors are completely arbitrary, of course, I've always considered 35mm a 2.5x crop factor of 6x9 ;-)

Richard
--
Formally posting as 'Blissfly'
 
HI

Thank you all for your comments and suggestions.

The Contax route doesn't offer a 35mm or 28mm, the Nikon has a 35mm 2.8 Ai listed old lens and I couldn't see whether it would focus at infinity.
Regardless I don't think that it's a viable route for me.

When I had my Sd14 for £300 I made, with DSG's design and help (thank you once again), a Mamiya 645 adapter. It was fun and gave me a very reasonable and cheap 80mm which was great for stitching due to it's sharpness across frame and lack of CA.
With the SD1 even at £1000 I don't want heath robinson solutions.

I think I will have to investigate the two zoom options:

17-50 or 17-70, then possibly the 50 or 70 macro.

Are the images here indicative of the 17-70?

http://www.sigma-photo.co.jp/english/sd1-photo-gallery/tshikano/index.html

Doesn't look too bad above 20mm.

Richard

--
Formally posting as 'Blissfly'
 
the 'extra reach' theory is a fallacy. Shoot the same scene with a full-frame and an APS-C from the same spot with the same focal length lenses. The crop the full-frame shot by 1/3 and you wind up with exactly the same shot as the APS-C. (The resolutions would probably be different, of course.) It's the Field of View, nothing more, nothing less---even when comparing different format cameras.
--
William Wilgus
 
Mostly Lurking said:
the 'extra reach' theory is a fallacy.
Click to expand...
Hi

I think that you will have to give me your definition of "extra reach" I fear a possible semantic malaise.
Mostly Lurking said:
Shoot the same scene with a full-frame and an APS-C from the same spot with the same focal length lenses. The crop the full-frame shot by 1/3 and you wind up with exactly the same shot as the APS-C. (The resolutions would probably be different, of course.) It's the Field of View, nothing more, nothing less---even when comparing different format cameras.
Click to expand...
Here goes FWIW:
I used my A900 as it can shoot in APSC as well as full frame:
First full frame





Now in APSC, look at that "extra reach" :-)





And lastly the Full frame cropped to APSC





My exposure is not spot on but not of relevance.

"Extra reach", "narrower field of view" two expressions of the same thing.

Richard

--
Formally posting as 'Blissfly'
 
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