Hi all, after reading almost every thread in the Sony section, I decided to take the plunge and buy an a900. (sold my Panasonic G1 and Leica M8 to finance this adventure...)
Since there's still not much information about the Sony Zeiss 16 - 35 I thought I'd start this thread.
At first, after reading the enthusiastic comments about the Sony Zeiss 24 - 70 I thought I'd buy that lens, but the general consensus on this forum and in other reviews is that this lens is not exactly stellar between 50 and 70 mm. The first lens I bought for the a900 was the Sony Zeiss 85 mm so I thought I might just a well go for the extreme wide angle. So far, I'm not disappointed. Yes, at 16 mm f2.8 the corners aren't great, but I'm not going to use f2.8 anyway. At f5.6 -f8.0 with the help of DXO the corners become quite acceptable for such a wide angle. I also did some tests inside a bookshop were I used f8.0 with 100 ISO and 1/5 (SSS really helps a lot here) and 1600 ISO and 1/60. Both shots look quite nice on my 24" Cinema Display. One has a little motion blur, the other some noise, but nothing I couldn't live with if I needed the shot and the depth of field.
Here are some testshots (no artistic intention) I took yesterday, developed in DXO. I'm still new to this software, and as you can see I still have a lot to learn. Controlling the exposure and DR I still find especially difficult with DXO. After fourteen days with the a900 and one week with DXO I'm quite happy with the results. Though I think C1 and Rawdeveloper give sharper results with more detail, DXO with the lens and perpective corrections can come in very handy with a lens like the Sony Zeiss 16 - 35. I did Keystoning corrections on the lighthouse picture.
One last thing for now, there's a new review of this lens here:
http://www.alphamountworld.com/reviews/sony-carl-zeiss-16-35mm-f28-review
Peter
Since there's still not much information about the Sony Zeiss 16 - 35 I thought I'd start this thread.
At first, after reading the enthusiastic comments about the Sony Zeiss 24 - 70 I thought I'd buy that lens, but the general consensus on this forum and in other reviews is that this lens is not exactly stellar between 50 and 70 mm. The first lens I bought for the a900 was the Sony Zeiss 85 mm so I thought I might just a well go for the extreme wide angle. So far, I'm not disappointed. Yes, at 16 mm f2.8 the corners aren't great, but I'm not going to use f2.8 anyway. At f5.6 -f8.0 with the help of DXO the corners become quite acceptable for such a wide angle. I also did some tests inside a bookshop were I used f8.0 with 100 ISO and 1/5 (SSS really helps a lot here) and 1600 ISO and 1/60. Both shots look quite nice on my 24" Cinema Display. One has a little motion blur, the other some noise, but nothing I couldn't live with if I needed the shot and the depth of field.
Here are some testshots (no artistic intention) I took yesterday, developed in DXO. I'm still new to this software, and as you can see I still have a lot to learn. Controlling the exposure and DR I still find especially difficult with DXO. After fourteen days with the a900 and one week with DXO I'm quite happy with the results. Though I think C1 and Rawdeveloper give sharper results with more detail, DXO with the lens and perpective corrections can come in very handy with a lens like the Sony Zeiss 16 - 35. I did Keystoning corrections on the lighthouse picture.
One last thing for now, there's a new review of this lens here:
http://www.alphamountworld.com/reviews/sony-carl-zeiss-16-35mm-f28-review
Peter