Bass Lake Dan
Well-known member
If it is of use to you: here is a link to my photo blog camera roll : of course those are compressed so I included with this post a few full frame jpg's... If you want DNGs or anything just email me..
The fact is that the lens operates over such a wide range of focal lengths and ability to near focus, that it can not help but have a lot of sweet points and contrary with those corollary sour points, so therefore performance tends to run all over the map. It would take a large spreadsheet and someone with a lot of time to map out a lens performance chart here. For example at infinity focus at 16mm the barrel distortion, and the edge focus issues are present, but go to 24mm and focus from 3 feet to 12 feet and you're good to go, but focus issues change and come and go with F stop changes and focal distances all across the lens range and the whole thing quickly degenerates into a grab-bag of "what you see is what you get". Some time excellent Zeiss like performance but sometimes just good here, bad there, and back again in a constantly changing pattern that you quickly realize becomes either a deal killer or you can live with it.
I personally can live with it, because my use is mostly a bunch of street portrait and "document the live event" type of candid rapid fire no-time-to-think get the shot before it disappears stuff. You could call my use sort of "advanced vacation photos stuff", usually always daylight, high shutter speeds, and a typical afternoon camera roll of 100 shots edits down to less than 50 "keepers" .. I have a bag full of great primes that I can bolt on if I need them, but here is the thing: The great strength of this lens is it versatility and speed of use. It's 10x faster for me to use this lens for what I do than to go to the primes. For me with OSS and auto focus and almost always crystal sharp center areas it beats the snot out of fooling around with switching through a bag full of primes just to get these "candid shots". I want these shots, but I need much better performance than the kit lens.. Don't get me wrong, the kit lens is a smashing good deal and I have taken hundreds of "keepers" with it. For $95 it is a steal. But eventually, when looking through your last roll from the kit lens, you get that nagging hair on the back of your neck bothering you. It tells you "darn a great candid shot, too bad that lens not just a notch higher in quality"
From the above narrative you can see that just about anyone with my shooting style would say, sure its time to get better speed of use / performance over the kit lens. But, what is that worth? For the last 40+ years I have bought and sold, owned and parted with so many cameras and lenses I have lost counting them. But I never remember having to pay 1000% more than the lesser kit lens to accomplish the goal. This is the toughest part of owing this lens. It's kind of strange, usually to a photographer, these decisions are made on a technical basis. But here you have to make the decision based in large part on what your banker thinks of the deal.
... just the usual with any new lens you add to your bag. Although here maybe a little more so. I spent the first part of the afternoon when the lens arrived shooting the usual flat brick walls until I was satisfied. My copy was "OK", I think if I had a way to go through 20 of them, I could probably have selected out one or two that were better, but I think what I have in hand is about what is generally the normal for this one. Later that afternoon, after the brick walls were shot, I moved on to an afternoon of real subjects.
The fact is that the lens operates over such a wide range of focal lengths and ability to near focus, that it can not help but have a lot of sweet points and contrary with those corollary sour points, so therefore performance tends to run all over the map. It would take a large spreadsheet and someone with a lot of time to map out a lens performance chart here. For example at infinity focus at 16mm the barrel distortion, and the edge focus issues are present, but go to 24mm and focus from 3 feet to 12 feet and you're good to go, but focus issues change and come and go with F stop changes and focal distances all across the lens range and the whole thing quickly degenerates into a grab-bag of "what you see is what you get". Some time excellent Zeiss like performance but sometimes just good here, bad there, and back again in a constantly changing pattern that you quickly realize becomes either a deal killer or you can live with it.
I personally can live with it, because my use is mostly a bunch of street portrait and "document the live event" type of candid rapid fire no-time-to-think get the shot before it disappears stuff. You could call my use sort of "advanced vacation photos stuff", usually always daylight, high shutter speeds, and a typical afternoon camera roll of 100 shots edits down to less than 50 "keepers" .. I have a bag full of great primes that I can bolt on if I need them, but here is the thing: The great strength of this lens is it versatility and speed of use. It's 10x faster for me to use this lens for what I do than to go to the primes. For me with OSS and auto focus and almost always crystal sharp center areas it beats the snot out of fooling around with switching through a bag full of primes just to get these "candid shots". I want these shots, but I need much better performance than the kit lens.. Don't get me wrong, the kit lens is a smashing good deal and I have taken hundreds of "keepers" with it. For $95 it is a steal. But eventually, when looking through your last roll from the kit lens, you get that nagging hair on the back of your neck bothering you. It tells you "darn a great candid shot, too bad that lens not just a notch higher in quality"
From the above narrative you can see that just about anyone with my shooting style would say, sure its time to get better speed of use / performance over the kit lens. But, what is that worth? For the last 40+ years I have bought and sold, owned and parted with so many cameras and lenses I have lost counting them. But I never remember having to pay 1000% more than the lesser kit lens to accomplish the goal. This is the toughest part of owing this lens. It's kind of strange, usually to a photographer, these decisions are made on a technical basis. But here you have to make the decision based in large part on what your banker thinks of the deal.
... just the usual with any new lens you add to your bag. Although here maybe a little more so. I spent the first part of the afternoon when the lens arrived shooting the usual flat brick walls until I was satisfied. My copy was "OK", I think if I had a way to go through 20 of them, I could probably have selected out one or two that were better, but I think what I have in hand is about what is generally the normal for this one. Later that afternoon, after the brick walls were shot, I moved on to an afternoon of real subjects.
