Hi Folks,
I hope everyone is happy and well. For your interest I've put together a comparison of the various "standard" focal length lenses for full frame use. As you can imagine there are many possible entrants and so to keep things manageable I've opted for 8 lenses in the 35 to 50mm focal length range, from Zeiss, Sigma, Canon and Nikon.
Notably there are a few lenses that I didn't include, because the test is not yet available on
Lenstip and/or there are limits to how much I can easily compose as windows on a double monitor layout and maintain good resolution. The focus here is on this focal length range for sharpness and low coma performance.
The contestants are:
- Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 35 mm f/1.4 ZE/ZF.2
- Carl Zeiss Milvus 50 mm f/1.4
- Carl Zeiss Otus 55 mm f/1.4 ZE/ZF.2
- Sigma A 35 mm f/1.4 DG HSM
- Sigma A 40 mm f/1.4 DG HSM
- Sigma A 50 mm f/1.4 DG HSM
- Canon EF 50 mm f/1.4 USM
- Nikon Nikkor AF-S 50 mm f/1.4G
I would have liked to also include the new Zeiss Milvus 35mm f/1.4 and new Nikkor Z standard lens for the Z6 and Z7 which is reputed to be an excellent performer for sharpness and coma along with one of the Sony normal lenses and a Samyang 35mm. There was either no data available or not enough space and/or these lenses were tested on a much higher resolution sensor, which will obviate the resolution MTF50 results comparison somewhat. As it stands the lenses included in the comparison were tested on either a Nikon D3x or Canon 5D MarkIII so the results are comparable.
If you have a double monitor or large format monitor open the image full screen, but even then it suffers from JPEG and forum compression.
Choose your new COMA killer !
Also look at the sharpness data (MTF50) with the lenses wide open. It is quite telling.
Best
JA