Well, Carl, I'm sorry to report that I don't think the 47 is the answer if you want much movement at infinity on the standard bellows. You get a couple of mm in any direction and that's it.
I didn't have much time to play with it, but for this first sample, I set the aperture to f/11, set the focus so the rear element had just enough clearance, pointed it at the edge of the building and walked backward until the edge of "usable" focus was right at the edge of the building. I'm terrible at estimating distances, but I'd say it's 150-200m. I had the camera tilted up slightly, so there were some very slight adjustments on the front standard. I also had the camera rotated 90 degrees, so the a7 was able to reach the maximum 38mm edge and then took a 6 shot pano with a hefty amount of overlap.
So, aside from the terrible framing and the dramatic shift in lighting mid-shoot, I'm very encouraged by what I see. Good center sharpness. I think I can pick up some improvement on the top edge with Kolari thin-filter mod (I'm sending the a7 off tomorrow). The fairly serious vignetting behaves as a grad ND in this case. There's a little color shift, though the changing light exaggerated the effect. Click through for a larger size.
a7_Actus_Schn47_Test2 by
Bradley Clemens, on Flickr
So then I moved in closer (7m or so) and normalized the Actus. I shot a six shot 63x64 pano and it looks good. Very manageable color shift. The vignetting is making me think that, if I keep it, a center filter might be a good idea. So then I gave it some (unnecessary) swing, up to the first mark. The color shift changed dramatically, significantly altering the amount of usable frame without correction.
a7_Actus_Schn47_Test1 by
Bradley Clemens, on Flickr
Something to consider if you use tilt and swing much. I can't imagine that it would be easy to create a correction profile for every given situation, because focus distance and the amount of movement change the behavior quite a bit. My uses for those movements are fairly limited on a lens this wide, so I can get by with a few profiles for my typical use-cases.
I can't say I'm overwhelmed with the lens, since making it as useful as I want it to be will require the wide rear standard and likely the single most expensive filter I will have ever purchased, but there are four things that make me want to keep it. 1. Where it's good, it's very, very good. 2. Low distortion. 3. Very well color corrected. 4. Feakin' tiny. It's like a fifth the size and weight of the Hassy 40. So I'll wait until the a7 comes back from Kolari and see if that makes a difference.