FINAL EDIT: Turns out, this lens was damaged. It has been returned, and a replacement purchased. A new thread will be started. Do not consider these results to represent this lens when in good condition.
Series Contents
Yes, the BEAST is now mine. I was chasing one on ebay (surreptitiously), but the auction disappeared and reappeared at a somewhat higher minimum bid, suggesting that the minimum bid I was hoping to snag it at was unacceptable to the seller. Fine. But Adorama had a used example for $100 more than the new minimum bid, and for a hundred bucks I'll take the ability to return it. Good luck, seller. Adorama called it excellent, but it really is a bit marked up in unimportant ways, so I would have called it good. But they had it priced appropriately for its outward condition, so that's fine. I'm happy to let someone else cry over the first bit of brassing on the edge of the filter ring. But Adorama did something that they often do that annoys me. KEH does it, too, often enough. They scavenged the hood off of it to sell separately and so I have a hood on order from a Japanese seller. That unsweetened the deal by about $70, but it was still several hundred less than offerings at the other standard suppliers (KEH, UsedPhotoPro, Beards and Hats, etc.).
Lots of stuff to look at with this lens. I had better lighting and far fewer leaves on my test scene, so the look will be different that with the other tests in this series. But I did something I did not do with my previous tests: I left the tripod in the house. I was fully expecting to have to go back and get it, but it was cold, and the wind was blowing annoyingly, and so I just stood there and made the photos. Thus, this is a test of shake reduction, too.
All photos were made at ISO 200, and given the quick default that DXO-Photolab provides to the DNG raw files, which does NOT include sharpening. I rather think the conversion to sRGB left them rather darker than it should have, and I went back and corrected it only when it mattered.
Here's the test scene at 28mm:
Compare this with the test scene from the 645 FA 35mm test:
It's a little misleading because I wasn't in exactly the same position by a couple of feet, but the 28's sweep is definitely wider than the 35's. I was about two feet to the right and maybe a foot closer to the scene in the top photo.
Don't draw conclusions from the rendering and color. The light was too different. The former test was a cloudy, humid day in the Spring when green was hypersaturated and abundant. And the top photo was made on November 10, on a crystal clear, blustery, dessicated, post-cold-front late-Fall day.
So, let's look at the center crops. These are 1:1, and if your monitor has a pixel resolution of 100 pixels/inch, as most approximately do, these are pieces of an image that would be seven feet wide.
28mm, f/4.5, center crop:
f/5.6:
f/8:
f/16:
In the center, at least, stopping down provides no benefit. This lens is as sharp at f/4.5 as at f/5.6, and then diffraction starts to become visible at f/8 and especially at f/16. The strategy with this lens is to used the widest aperture that provides the needed depth of field.
So, what about at the edges? Here's a crop from the very top of the f/4.5 image:
The thin branches are in the focus plane, and the trunk bark at the left is maybe half that distance. The pines in the background are much farther away than the focus plane, and they are not sharp because of lack of depth of field. But at 28mm, there is a lot of native depth of field, even at f/4.5. But I see no loss of performance at the top edge.
Let's look at 35mm, which provides an opportunity for comparison with the FA35. I'm comparing f/8 on the 28-45 with f/11 on the 35. I'm also comparing a hand-held photo at 1/25 shutter speed with a more carefully made photo using a tripod. And it makes a difference.
Here's the 28-45, hand-held at 1/25, at 35mm and f/8:
And here's the FA35, at f/11:
I'm blown away by the overall performance of the 28-45 in fast-moving circumstances, but it is NOT better than a fixed prime used with careful technique. I will go back and make more careful photos with the zoom lens, and update this post.
The shutter speed at 45mm was a bit slower, at 1/15, aperture at f/8. Let's see how that one went:
And here is the 45mm end of the 45-85, which is the end of the longer zoom most favored.
I'm reasonably impressed that it's as sharp as it is at 1/15 shutter speed, but, again, technique matters, and shake reduction is no substitute for a tripod when expectations are high. I'm not done with this part of the test.
If it turns out that the above is what I get even wtih a tripod, the lens may--I said
may--go back.
But, while I wait for tomorrow to pull out the tripod, here are some other shots to test other features--shake reduction and the new coatings. First, a general shot of the front yard in a different direction, with a few minutes of fiddling in Photolab. This is at f/8 and a shutter speed of 1/20. Shake Reduction might not replace a tripod, but it can sure replace a faster shutter speed hand-held. I would normally expect to need a shutter speed of 1/125 to get an image this crisp, even at 28mm. But, also, the lens contributes to a rendering that reminds me of good transparency film. There is a abundance of tonal information to work with, in addition to resolution. And that's with the colors a bit washed out by the sRGB gamut conversion.
Another review of this lens complained about shake reduction. Shake reduction works for rotations about axes normal to the centerline of the lens, which pilots recognize as yaw and pitch, but it does not work for rotations around the centerline, which pilots call roll. So, at marginal shutter speeds the image will be sharp in the middle but may show some movement at the edges. Shake reduction also doesn't correct translational vibration--the camera moving side to side instead of rotating. The image can't tell between the two at distance, and lateral motions at distance are usuallty negligible, because a tiny motion at the camera equals a tiny motion of the scene--too tiny to have an effect. But at close focus distances, it matters. So, I made a photo at close distances just to see what happened. Here's the trunk of that river birch from about three feet away, with the lens zoomed to 45mm, at f/8 and a slow shutter speed of 1/20:
And here's a 1:1 crop from the center at the focus point:
And, to see if shake reduction wasn't enough for the corner at this distances, here's the lower left corner:
I think shake reduction works pretty good in maginal conditions when using a tripod isn't feasible.
Finally, we need a sunset shot for the Grand Lens Test to ride into. I made this photo because who can resist a sunset photo? But I also made it to test for flare. And there isn't much with this lens. 28mm at f/8, with a shutter speed fast enough (1/160) not to be about shake reduction:
Here's a crop from the sun's part of the image to show that flare is minimal under extreme test, both lens reflections and veiling flare.
Rick "somewhat mixed results, and more testing is required" Denney
Last edited by rdenney; 12-01-2018 at 02:17 PM.