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ZEISS ADVERTISEMENT FEATURE
ZEISS HAS, PERHAPS, MADE THE ULTIMATE STILLS/CINE CROSSOVER LENSES – DURABLE, A JOY TO USE AND OPTICALLY PEERLESS
The first thing that strikes you is the contrast they render. Coupled with the incredible resolution – at any aperture – it brings a sparkle and depth to images. Flare kills dynamic range, so this clean contrast should put Otus at the top of your list if you’re delivering HDR. Filming into a bright sunset was a revelation, with the lenses holding detail throughout the sunlit clouds with no masking of contrast in the foreground. Photography is about light, and these lenses shepherd that light like – well, like a Master Prime. Handling is equally fabulous – with or without the lens gear. Focus is smooth and accurate, though being a stills lens design there is some breathing. The 28mm has a focus ring rotation of 120º – it doesn’t need more – and the 55mm travels through 248º. ZEISS has, perhaps, made the ultimate stills/cine crossover lenses – durable, a joy to use and optically peerless.
28mm manages the same flat-field wide open performance – astonishing in a wide angle lens. It’s obviously hard to do, as ZEISS has had to pack 16 elements in 13 groups into its nearly 1.4kg body. You would have thought that light bouncing around off all those glass elements would cause lens flare in tricky conditions, but that’s not the case. Flare is exceptionally well controlled – again I have rarely seen as good. In general filming, even into the low winter sun, there is almost no veiling flare. ZEISS has long had an enviable reputation for its skill in controlling flare, and the Otus lenses excel – contributing in a great part to the excellent contrast in the pictures they produce. And what pictures they are. For all the technical prodding and poking we subject these lenses to, at the end of the day it’s the images that count, and the results from ZEISS’ Otus lenses are simply brilliant.
As the aperture is reduced, resolution increases over the frame – though slightly more in the centre than at the edge – until diffraction starts to play its part around f/8. Minimum aperture on all the current Otus range is f/16. Basically, if you think your image is anything but pin-sharp at f/1.4, it’s because it’s out of focus. The depth- of-field on the 85mm – working a couple of metres from your subject – is just 4 to 5mm. Fortunately, the ultra-smooth focus action on the Otus 85mm helps, with a large, 261º rotation angle, but you’ll need keen eyesight and fantastic focus aids on your camera if you are going to work close-in at maximum aperture. The 55mm f/1.4 is as impressive optically as the 85mm. With 12 elements in ten groups it’s also nearly as heavy, at about 1kg. It has the same flat field of focus at f/1.4, with the same rise in centre resolution with decreasing aperture. In fact, even the
THIS PAGE Oozing class, the ZEISS Otus 85mm, 55mm and 28mm f/1.4 lenses are of all- metal construction. An optional lens gear is available.
MORE INFORMATION: www.zeiss.com/otus
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MARCH 2018 DEFINITION
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