Yeah I know - I was having a laugh at the perfectly framed pics of your good self titled as being shot by you ....... ;) Good stuff anyway .,

try to focus on your finger near face – then you’ll see bokeh. And you won’t call it near perfect )

Do you see DS bokeh with your eyes?

I have seen DS bokeh in impressionistic paintings, hence, perfect lens for the artist photographer.

I do not see it even in one, and you cannot point out a single painting.

Georges Seurat - this is not bokeh in the first place.

I don't know, man. Renoir's "Two Sisters (On A Terrace) does have a very refined treatment of the background. Artists aren't idiots and are just as capable of borrowing effects from photography as we are of stealing ideas from them.

@J A C S - I said there were "some works"(more than one) by three painters. You just have to look at some of their paintings. I am sure that you will see or "see".
I did not say that anyone borrowed anything from anyone else. I just compared that lenses' rendering as an "artistic" rendering as opposed to the clinical sharp look of other 50mm lenses.
A more radical "artsy" look lens is Lensbaby's latest Venus offering.
Maybe I should have left out Georges Seurat and Van Gogh, because you did not get my comparisons.

To what do you object? Photographers having an influence on painters? Or the idea that Renoir and his contemporaries might have seen photographs at all?

Do I see DS-style bokeh with my eyes? Yes I do, but that's because I have the gift of horrible myopia. When I take off my spectacles the world becomes a fairy kingdom of dancing, glowing orbs (and no cat's eyes at the edges, either).
To my eyes all these enhanced bokeh lenses—the Minolta/Sony STF, the Fuji APD, and this Canon—look like they're trying to replicate the exquisite out of focus behavior that was typical of 19th and early 20th century view cameras—which is why I think MyReality cued in on the painters he did.
Do they succeed? Not completely but they're better than many of the hashy optics that are out there.

Makes one comment in 2015 and then waits 5 years before making a brutal critique of the sample photos with his second comment of all time.

No kidding. Not a single photo of a cat.

Did someone pee in your cornflakes?

No.

You put your cats in the fridge for a couple of hours to drop the body temperature and they will slow down quite a bit. Diazepam does the same thing, but you need to be strict about the dose or they stop breathing.
Where could I see some of your photos, please?

Yes. I read your comments and agree.. as perhaps you and others said the Sony 100 is in a perfect range for headshots. But perhaps lacking a little in full length portraits.

For the clueless few like me could you please explain why this lens isn't for people who shoot portraits stopped down. Thank you.

TheGrammarFairy

It will work fine. But it will give you exactly the same pictures as a regular Canon RF 85mm F1.2 L USM. You may even get less sensitive autofocus in low light in case the camera is set to use max. aperture for focusing. (I don't know if it's possible on the current R bodies though...)

To take advantage of the apodization element (DS version), you have to shoot wide opened. Then, you have a big transmission penalty (you loose ~1.5EV in terms of exposure), but you get very, very, smooth bokeh and smoother focus/out-of-focus transition

In short :
@F1.2, DS looses 1.5EV of light transmission ('no low light beast') but offers a very, very smooth bokeh (that some may like and some may dislike, it's vert special!) as well as smoother transitions. It's important to note that you *cannot* get the bokeh of the regular version wide opened. The effect is *not* adjustable.
@F2.0 or more closed, both DS and non-DS version give same results.
In-between a mixture of the two.

Headshots, close up (minimum distance)? F4.0, both on 58mm and 85mm. Works a treat. Careful choice of lighting and background helps as well obviously.

Distance creates... distance.

Right. That’s the point. You don’t need f1.2 for close up headshots. If you stop this lens down to f2.8 or f4.0 then it becomes the same as the non DS. So What kind of look do you get from this lens with full length portraits at f1.2? No gallery shots to demonstrate this.

US corporate portraits are all the same. It's an overpaid, politically conservative, cynical, greedy white parasite who manipulates the people that work for him with on one hand, threats of financial ruin and on the other appeals to patriotism, faith, and company loyalty, none of which he believes. Generally shot from the sternum up with a 3:1 lighting ratio.

@TheGrammarFairy: LOL! OK.

I think f2.8 (on FF) is needed for half-body or closer portraits. And for close up of the face, even f5.6 may be needed.

Sorry, I’ m not doing side-by-side tests, I’m shooting film and have a good overall experience with many different film cameras, including the old ones to judge the aesthetic qualities. Say, 20-30 years ago it was rather difficult to find a lens (or a fixed lens camera) with ‘totally bad’ 3D effect.
And this disease definitely came about when manufacturers had to cover the large sensors with many megapixels for pixel-peeping people shouting here and there ’Oh-uh! There’s no pixel sharpness at the corners!’
Those strange people fearing of vignette, CA etc – all things that make image alive.

So correcting everything produces ‘ideal’ but lifeless lenses. I’t a commonly known problem of contemporary optics. Cinematographists had known about it long before DSLR or mirrorless era gave birth to all these megapixel monsters and pixel-peeping crowds without aesthetic experience nor good taste.

@Dmitry Novak
Then don't show me your samples but any samples you can find on the internet. If that is such a common problem it would be documented. But aside from opinion pieces, nobody can actually show side by side what the 3D-Look is. I have not seen a single example of that

LOL! The "flatness" is due to the bland bokeh, which you find pleasant.

The '3D look' is usually down to the sheer amount of space you have to work with. It's got little-to-nothing to do with who made the lens, manual vs automatic, or anything else.
All it means is it looks like there is larger depth between your subject and their environment. And they way to do that is to have... larger depth between your subject and their environment. As long as you get all of your subject in sharp focus and all of the background well away form the plane of focus, you're set. If your subject is 6' from you and the background is 200' away, you're going to get 'pop' with a cheap 50mm f/1.8 at f/4. If your subject is 10' away from you and the background is only another 2' away from them, you're not going to get any kind of 'pop' no matter what lens or settings you use.

Dmitry here is just being a bad parody. I still shoot large format as well as modern digital APS-C & 35mm and there is no more or less inherent '3D look' to any of the formats, systems or lenses.

@milkod2001

100% agree. people feel they need to shoot close up face images at open aperture. it looks weird and all the blurry detracts from the final image. stopping down to 2.8 is not going to emasculate you

also, the regular NON DS looks better. absolutely better.

The apodization element (DS/APD/STF...) effect vanishes very quickly when you stop down. If you stop down to f/2.0~2.8, then the lens will just behave as a regular Canon RF 85mm F1.2 L USM. Nothing more. Nothing less.

That's one of the reasons why I think Sony made a better choice with its Sony FE 100mm F2.8 GM OSS STF. F2.8 (with a 'practical'depth of field that is actually closer to F4.0 due to the light distribution of the out-of-focus points) is way easier to deal with with what such lenses are good for, aka portraits with some context and proxyphoto (flower, etc.).

That said, I would like to see more full body shots at F1.2. The Canon fcould be interesting for that prupose.

That could also be an effect of the curved support.

Some light coming from the drops in the background may not be to make its path to all the surface of the front element, partly hidden, giving that truncated bokeh.

I did manage to forget that the EOS R defaults to EFCS, so there will be truncated bokeh at high shutter speeds.

However, the onion ring texture and the longitudinal CA that the OP raises would not be caused or affected by this.

No, of course Canon isn't asking us not to shoot certain types of photos: we wouldn't ever accept a restriction like that.

I've added a full-body F1.2 example, just for you. The light's not great, right now, but that's what I could get.

It's a lightroom problem

"Soft focus can be somewhat simulated in post-processing..."

Also by user error...

@QuietOC
True, but only with CDAF. You can focus really any lens that way.
The special thing on the Sony STF (and now Canon) is that you can focus it with PDAF

Also, In my opinion, both loawa and Fuji dropped the ball on the mechanical vignetting side, which destroys the effect

The Fuji APD looks a lot less effective to me, and I agree the Laowa isn't quite as good either -- actually, very similar to what I've gotten with homemade apodization filters. From this small sample (which doesn't really have any seriously bright OOF highlights in any image), I'd agree that this Canon looks very comparable to the old Minolta/Sony 135... which is a tad poorer than the Sony 100.

Actually, the thing that freaks me out is that nobody is doing the STF-emulation like the old Minolta Maxxum 7. It's a simple bracketing-like multi-exposure stack which easily could be done in camera -- I know because I did it inside old Canon PowerShots using my own code with CHDK. Better still, you could do it by dynamically varying the aperture during exposure... which is a bit demanding on the aperture motor speed and accuracy, but should be viable for slowish shutter speeds (and then IBIS maintains alignment). As panther fan pointed out, the real quality limit is mechanical vignetting.