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Bad bokeh limits it's usefulness.

Started Jun 20, 2014 | User reviews thread
Great Bustard Forum Pro • Posts: 45,641
Re: That's the first I've heard that.

NottsPhoto wrote:

Colour is excellent mind, And it gives a very nice feel... But the 35 1.4 which a colleague of mine has has noticeably better bokeh...

Thanks for the example! To me, the most obvious standout is that it appears a bit soft -- I didn't see anything off-putting in the bokeh. That said, next time you have an opportunity to use the 35 / 1.4L, shoot a scene, or couple of scenes, with both lenses and compare. That is, whatever you found objectionable about the bokeh in the photo above may have been scene dependent, and you'd have also found it objectionable with the 35 / 1.4L.

For example, PZ says this about the bokeh of the lens:

The out-of-focus highlight rendition is pretty clean with a slight outlining effect.

The situation changes a bit when moving towards the corners. The highlight discs deteriorate and the outlining effect gets emphasized.

The quality of the general blur in the focus transition zone is pretty good. The foreground blur is a bit busy whereas the more critical background blur is quite smooth and better than most zoom lenses for instance and also significantly improved over its predecessor. Such a good bokeh is quite unusual for a wide-angle lens featuring an aspherical element.

As opposed to what they say about the 35 / 1.4L:

The bokeh (the quality of the out-of-focus blur) is a primary aspect for an ultra large aperture lens. However, the Canon does not totally convince here. It is, of course, capable of producing a very shallow depth-of-field but especially the foreground blur is a bit nervous at f/1.4 whereas the background blur is generally smoother. Out-of-focus highlights can also be a bit nervous at max. aperture if they reside close to the image borders. The technical quality of the bokeh improves at f/2 and f/2.8 although the blur effect diminishes of course. To be fair - this characteristic is all not overly surprising because wide-angle lenses with aspherical elements are rarely good renowned for the quality of the bokeh. The lens performs better on APS-C DSLRs where the critical border portion is masked out.

Naturally, I'm not saying these comments are definitive by any means.  Just saying that PZ's analysis is more in line with other reviews I've heard.

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