80-100mm lens comparison part I

I received the voigtlander 90 app the other day and posted my first impressions.

As promised I started testing the lens against my other short teles. Since most of my existing lens collections are for canon. I compared all lenses on my 5DII. The lenses tested are:

Canon 70-200/2.8 (non-IS version) @85

Zeiss Jena Biometar 80/2.8 MC (this is MF lens with a shift adapter) 

Canon 85/1.8

Canon 100/2.8 macro

Zeiss vario-sonnar (C/Y) 28-85

Canon 90/TSE

leica 100/2.8 apo
zeiss planar 85/1.4
zeiss sonnar 85/2.8


LV (live view) was used to focus each lens at approximately the center of the image. Each image was taken in LV mode to minimize vibration.
A 100% crop from each of the marked regions are available for side-by-side comparison.


Compare images side by side.
Pick your lens from the dropdown list
Select f-stop
Select image area.

f/stop:	f/stop:
Region: Center   Top Right   Top Left   APSC Edge	Region: Center   Top Right   Top Left   APSC Edge

Voigtlander 90mm F/3.5 SL II APO-Lanthar arrived

Voigtlander 90mm F/3.5 SL II APO-Lanthar Arrived Today!

This lens came to my radar after reading the rave comments by at Diglloyd. At that point the lens was still in stock at B&H and other retailers as it had just been discontinued. However, other D800/e users looking for an affordable optics for their new 36mp camera must have read Lloyd's blog as well as it quickly went out of stock but available on ebay with a bit of premium. 

Having forgotten about this lens, I came across a copy at Fredmirnada's Buy & Sell Forum at a great price of $415 including shipping and paypal fees. Needless to say temptation got the better of me and after seller sending me a few sample images it only took a few clicks on paypal and the waiting game began. 

So the lens is here and it's in  a great shape. Only minor issue, the seller must be a smoker as I can smell it on the box and even on the lens-strange!  Correction: the smell came from the wooden box the lens was stored in. 

So without hesitation I put the lens on D800e for some first-impressions. First of all, having all those pixels on the D800e is rather amazing as you can see from the crop below: 

At maximum f/stop of 3.5 there is a bit color fringing, but nothing that ACR can not handle and by f/8 the fringing on focused area are completely gone. However, out of focus ares will continue to show fringing. Little bit disappointing for a lens labeled as "APO". 

That said, this lens is pretty sharp looking at the 100% crops at f/8 below:

Here is another shot. First is the full image and the second is the 100% crop:

I will be testing this lens against a few other in similar focal range. Unfortunately, most of my lenses in those ranges are canon lenses and I'll be testing this lens using a F-> EOS adapter on the 5DII.