Kerlee 35mm F1.2 is 'World's fastest' 35mm for full-frame SLRs

I was talking to RolliPoli. ;)

Rokinon/ Samyangs are pretty beastly, I'm thinking of getting this Karlee lens myself...

leonche64, I believe Pat is talking about the American Civil War... not sure which war your thinking about? The American Civil War started about 1861... that clearly would make it over 150 years ago... not 80 years... just FYI. BTW, civil rights has always been an issue, around the world, where people live under oppressive dictatorship. HAGD, Bob

The Chinese Civil War was fought from 1927 to 1950.

Its not slave labour, plenty of half empty factories in Shenzhen with people moving back to their families in the West, the factories have increased pay to retain them, there have been a load of labour laws added, lots of auditing etc. Worst I can say about the labour is that it is hard to find good quality in the region, but certainly not slave labour.

@0MitchAG
>>I suppose Pat would just prefer if they were unemployed.

Not at all. I was thinking about employment when I said, "Maybe it's not as simple as that." It's a moral dilemma, don't you think?

But let's get back to out lenses and cameras....

It's not as much of a dilemma as it used to be, or will become with automation in the future. They are definitely not slaves (and neither is anyone in the West, but the way the free market is set up, it can often feel that way).

@Pat Cullinan Jr

What are you talking about? I live in Shenzhen China, and I was in Xixiang just the other day. There is no slave labor going on in the manufacture of anything. Living conditions in this area are comparable in every way to any large American city and in some ways quite a bit better. You have some strange misconceptions.

What about Foxconn? Or the suicide nets?

So what because a few factories have had severe work conditions it applies to the entire region? I recall seeing reports that many Apple Factories were filled with child workers. And upon being reprimanded they actually hired MORE of them. Do you expect everyone to boycott Apple products?

Actually, the suicide rate at Foxconn is less than that of other factories and is in fact 20x lower than China's average suicide rate in the general population, as the conditions and wages are better.
Slavery is much more rampant in other countries, to be quite honest, and mostly everybody turns a blind eye to them because they are in industries which we take for granted. You should do your own research and not make blind accusations Pat.

And then there's the Tien An Men Square Massacre. The communists raked he square from midnight to 5 A.M., leaving 4,000 dead.

Really? Bringing up something that happened decades ago under entirely different leadership? The China of Today is NOTHING like it was that long ago. I gave out 4 bibles today. To Police Officers. Who go to a Church. Legally.

The major cities of China are as developed as any American city, have better transportation systems, and the Chinese poverty rate is lower than the American poverty rate. In fact most working Chinese consider having 30,000 usd in their savings account as "Not a lot, everybody has at least that much". That's coming directly from my coworker who makes HALF of what I do.

Get over your racism. China is a fantastic country and Economically, and culturally is actually ahead of the United States in dozens of ways. I am assuming you are an American as few other people would be that racist and bullheaded.

"What about Foxconn? Or the suicide nets?" I actually worked for Foxconn from 2004-2010. Foxconn had a policy of paying death benefits to the families of workers that died while on the job, regardless of reason. Once they removed suicide from that list of payable causes, they stopped. The nets were a precaution.
As to the child workers, yes and no. In China you can start working full time at the age of 16. They are not under the illusion that everyone is college material, so allow them to apprentice, go to trade school, join the family business, etc. Foxconn would have half day training and half day of working for workers in a program that would bring in teenagers from rural areas. It was either 3 or 6 months after which they would either become full time or head back to their hometowns. I am from Georgia, in the States. Every summer, driving up US 17 you would see teens out on the farm putting in work. Not much different.

And what about the persecution of Falun Gong?

What do you think you know about it?

Falun Gong members appear every now and then in New York's Grand Central Station witnessing to government harassment. I saw them there last Wednesday.

I suggest we get back to our topic -- lenses.

You can surely understand how it could vex a person's conscience to buy products of slave labor -- or we could at least call it terribly exploited labor. Everybody knows how sweatshops are roundly denounced in this country. Why then should we draw the line for Red China? Does conscience count for nothing? I won't get into the story of the Chinese worker who came home from work to learn that the authorities had seized his wife and forcibly aborted his baby. It's hardly better in this country -- 60 million Americans aborted since 1973. You don't have to be a religion maniac to see something wrong about that. And shall we just forget about the Tien An Men Square Massacre? It would take a revolution to change a regime possessed of such malice as that. The wolf changes his skin, not his mind.

Sounds like communist propaganda to me.

I can confirm this by experiment with my Sigma 50 mm f1.4 on the Canon EOS 60D. The experiment is really simple and requires to take a picture at f1.4, then release the locking of the lens mount and rotate it a bit, so the contacts are disconnected. The camera does not know that a lens is attached and does not know it to be f1.4, so it does not automatically rise the sensitivity, while still displaying ISO 100. A picture taken now shows a clear difference in brightness of the image, even though the illumination conditions and exposure time remained the same. You can connect the lens again, stop down the lens to f1.6, take a picture. Then press the preview DOF button and while holding it disconnect the lens electrically by rotating a bit, so the aperture remains locked in the f1.6 position but the camera does not get this information, and you get the same effect, but with a smaller magnitude. From f1.8 above there is no difference. So the camera sensor is limited by its own microlenses.

What you wanted to say is http://www.dxomark.com/Reviews/F-stop-blues right? It is a bit older article but still valid.

The microlenses in your camera are not the lensmaker's problem. However, it is difficult to know exactly what to expect from f/1.2. Just rounding the f/number to two digits makes it unclear if f/1.2 is 1/2 or 1/3 stop faster than f/1.4. There is also the fact that the bokeh (OOF PSF) size for a given level of defocus can vary somewhat depending on the design of the lens. The effective f/number issue gets even more complex in that T/numbers are what determine the amount of light actually transmitted -- different lenses can have significantly different loss due to internal reflections, etc.

In any case, I expect this is a very fast 35mm lens that is probably ok wide open and very good stopped down a bit. If you want to get really speed crazy, an SLR -mount version also could be used on a mirrorless mount focal reducer to get something like an APS-C 25mm f/0.9.

@ProfHandD: Out of curiosity, is there a particular challenge with designing a lens that works out as exactly f/1.2000, say?

@Dr_Jon:
I can do the experiment once again, under controlled conditions. As far as I remember, also the pixels in the center of the frame were not as bright at f1.4 as one would expect. The pixels near the corners must have been worse off, but this is not normal lens vignetting. Also, the EOS 60D with the Sigma 50 mm f1.4 does not have any peripheral illumination correction and I shoot RAW anyway. I already sold my Sigma 85 mm f1.4 so I cannot do the experiment with it, but I expect it would give similar results.

My Mandarin is sketchy at best, but my French, Spanish and German languages are excellent. Thanks for asking

kaikai long tingling

Yupela min tingting? Kaikai long tingting?

"food for thought" brother. I'm still waiting for the Irix lens to show up

@ John - Image quality is still stuck in the 70's and 80's, but maybe soon, they'll give us something to marvel at.

Success as in 'it gets rave reviews and sells like hotcakes'.

I have seen the reviews from the main youtube reviewers and there was no rave, only positive. TCS found the AF to be modest in continuous and the ergonomics quirky and DRev found the video to be modest as well as the ergonomics.

Also, there seems to be a production shortage, in my country at least, one person that I know that ordered one, did not get it. And he's the only one I know that's getting one so it might sell like hotcakes somewhere else, who knows. I checked the Amazon top sale DSLR's and I think it was in 80'th place or something, or 90'th.

Almost all third party manual focus lenses were released for pentax! The only excluded are zeiss and voigtlander, discontinued because there was a lack of interest from pentax users. By now k-1 changed nothing, nor did the electronic aperture, luckily if you consider that for canon all this manual lenses work in stop down!

It's easy to support Pentax when you make lenses like m42 presets from the 1950's , just screw a K-mount adapter on it.

@nicolaiecostel If you are using a stock focus screen, you can't see DOF faster than f/2.8

While I like and use manual focus lenses, at f1.2 that would be a real pain, and if you arent shooting f1.2 then why use this lens?

If you shoot at fast aperatures regularly, you should switch out your focus screen. I have no issues focusing at f/1.2 on my D750 with an S type screen from focusingscreen.com.

I use a Zeiss 135 f2, a Nikon 45mm PC-E 2.8 shift tilt, and a Zeiss 21 2.8, all manual focus, and I have my technique down but I've not been convinced by the focus screens available. The magnified eyepiece helps, but still 1.2 is a tiny tiny DOF at close distances (and they mention that the lens performs best at close distances).

One Curis Gampat talks about the experience of using the MF Rokinon 24mm f/1.4 here: http://www.thephoblographer.com/2012/04/03/review-rokinon-24mm-f1-4-lens-canon-eos/#.V2DNSxI8zNB

He remarks, "The best thing to do is to use an LCDVF." That's here: http://www.thephoblographer.com/2011/11/10/kinotehnik-lcdvf-viewfinder-hdslr-video/#.V2DNFxI8zNB

B&H have umpteen LCDVF's: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1087205-REG/elvid_ov_250_optiview_250_lcd_viewfinder.html. Scroll to the bottom of the page.

Thanks for clarifying this

"Perhaps you are being sarcastic, but generally a "fast" lens has nothing to do with its AF speed or AF capability. It has to do with letting in the most possible light with wider apertures so that faster shutter speeds can be used in challenging lighting conditions. A f1.2 lens is a very fast lens with or without AF."
--
Thanks, Tech Jedi.

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@FastGlassLover
You're quite right of course. Given your chosen name I fully comprehend having hit the nerve. My hurried comment clearly didn't clarify what I had going on inside when I chose to speak out.
Seeing yet another product offered by yet another Chinese manufacturer who seems to have reinvented the wheel with the usual spate of poorly written descriptive jewels such as:
" It's globally the first 35mm F/1.2 large aperture lens that supports single-lens reflex full-frame cameras. When taking an image, set the aperture to Maximum f1.2 can conspicuously emphasize the subject on the background, producing a nice picture atmosphere."
and taking into account that there are an abundance of large aperture manual focus lenses in the world, made to I'm sure far more exacting standards, the fact that the only outstanding difference is the mount makes me wonder at its necessity.