With Sony being quite slow in ramping up production of new E mount native lenses, and particularly the E 50mm f/1.8 OSS (I've been on a waiting list with Amazon for over 2 months now), the ever increasing community of NEX users has been actively evaluating a variety of alternative 50mm primes easily adoptable to the NEX mount. This particular comparison traces roots to fredmiranda.com's alternative gear forum, where a bunch of die-hard alternative glass users have been debating the properties of a number of Zeiss 50mm lenses on NEX cameras. I got curious in the topic and volunteered to do a quick test with a few popular, and often considered high-quality, 50s.
This section of the review will showcase bokeh rendering of 8 alternative lenses on NEX-5n. Results below are presented without much commentary - considering that tasted vary quite widely, I will let the reader decide which of the lenses have the most appealing characteristics. I will repeat this test on NEX-7 in a couple of weeks, but will use a different focusing distance, which hopefully would present the readers with a more diverse overview of the tested lenses. Finally, a third part of the review will compare more general characteristics like resolution, vignetting and lateral CA (expect very opinionated commentary in this section).
Before we jump to results, let's touch base on the test conditions:
PS. I would not recommend using the samples below to evaluate sharpness of individual lenses - I did not use focus bracketing and individual shots might have minor variance in focusing accuracy.
Go to Part 2 of the comparison
Voigtlander 50mm f/1.1 M
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Carl Zeiss Sonnar 50mm f/1.5 ZM
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Carl Zeiss Planar 50mm f/2 ZM
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Leica Summicron M 50mm f/2 Rigid
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Leica Summicron M 50mm f/2 Collapsible
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Leica Summarit 50mm f/1.5 LTM
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Jupiter 3 50mm f/1.5 LTM
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Canon 50mm f/1.2 LTM
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