A
asabet
Guest
Hi Jono,
I agree the flower shot is beautiful with a pleasing background blur and transition from sharp to out of focus. Again, I wasn't saying the lens had poor bokeh rendering, only that some give it that rap and that I had insufficient data to have an opinion. I feel that the coexistence of balanced sharpness across the frame and consistently pleasing bokeh rendering is a major strength of Nikon's top standard zoom. It sounds like you've done due diligence in evaluating the Zeiss to see how it stands up, which is all I was recommending.
With regards to comparing crops, you make a good point. The nice thing about evaluating bokeh is that (unlike the evaluation of sharpness) significant problems are generally evident even after resizing whole images for the web. Some of the "bad bokeh" examples I've seen from this lens show minute OOF areas at 100% in the corner of the frame. That's just silly IMO.
I agree the flower shot is beautiful with a pleasing background blur and transition from sharp to out of focus. Again, I wasn't saying the lens had poor bokeh rendering, only that some give it that rap and that I had insufficient data to have an opinion. I feel that the coexistence of balanced sharpness across the frame and consistently pleasing bokeh rendering is a major strength of Nikon's top standard zoom. It sounds like you've done due diligence in evaluating the Zeiss to see how it stands up, which is all I was recommending.
With regards to comparing crops, you make a good point. The nice thing about evaluating bokeh is that (unlike the evaluation of sharpness) significant problems are generally evident even after resizing whole images for the web. Some of the "bad bokeh" examples I've seen from this lens show minute OOF areas at 100% in the corner of the frame. That's just silly IMO.
Hi Amin
I took around 100 shots with the lens around Norwich, and although I did detect a little 'busyness' in some shots, I thought that the shot of the flower (above) was rather nice.
One thing one needs to be really careful about here is comparing 100% crops from the A900 and the D700 - because they represent a radically different proportion of the file.
As for general observations on the lens - It seems to be very sharp, right down to f2.8, certainly in the same ball park as the Nikon. At first sight there might be a tiny bit more barrel distortion at 24mm, but it is SIMPLE, and not the wiggly stuff Nikon tends to dish out, so, if necessary it's easy to correct.
The whole package (body and lens) is about the same size as the D700, but the lens is short and fat rather than long and thinner (like the Nikon). It's also very slightly lighter (but so little as to make no significant difference).