85mm f/1.2L II USM - Brilliant Lens...

Fog Maker wrote:

Abu Mahendra wrote:

I am holding out for an Otus 85, Marco. As you yourself said in another thread, some people are easily impressed with lesser lenses.

Good for you. I couldn't bother with manual focus lenses anymore. It doesn't do 1.2, has worse bokeh, but is indeed sharper in the edges/corners.

But remember the Canon is still overall one of the sharpest lenses they currently make.

Love mine.

To the OP: Good and accurate review, hasn't experienced any of the focus problems you refer to though. My copy is bang on without mf (which is always a combination of both body and lens)

and I never felt the need to mf any of the rental copies (however I seldom shoot at 1.2 when working, so I didn't thoroughly test any of those copies.)

The OTUS lens is a nice piece of equipment and I like the attention to detail during construction.  The only downside I can think of is that if you use on a Canon DSLR and then calibrate the lens on the camera, the camera only stores Canon EF lens Profiles (the 6D stores up to 40 lenses).  So after you dismount the lens, you may need to recalibrate the camera in order to match the lens each time you put it on.  As Fog Maker noted, the problem of calibration is a mixture of lens AND camera manufacturing tolerance differences. That alone will have me side-stepping the Otis lens because even if it's perfect straight out of the box, the cameras themselves have tolerance ranges... which are not adjustable (hence the micro-adjustment feature) so you may end up with complications either way.  At almost two and a half times the price of the already expensive Canon 85mmL, I'm not sure I'd appreciate the differences because for me, the whole point of the 85mmL lens is to present most of your image out of focus.  The reputation of the 85mmL is enough for me to feel no buyer's remorse.  I can't imagine why anyone would be remotely disappointed with the Otus lens although I'm seeing prices well over USD $5250.00 for that lens (ouch!).
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You're right about people being impressed with "lesser" lenses though.  Of course many haven't been able to use better lenses with their cameras or perhaps they don't notice the finer details and color differences between glass.  It's interesting to see how different people like and dislike certain lenses.  The main complaint (and the most consistent complaint) about the 85mmL lens was that it was "slow".  But I find it more than adequate.  I really did expect something dog-slow that took 5 seconds to lock focus... I was more than pleasantly surprised with near instant-to-1 second AF times.  It's certainly not unusable at this speed.