Kolari thin-stack mod on a7II vs M240 — Leica 50/1.4 Summilux

This is part 12 in a series of posts on a prototype of the Kolari Vision thin-stack sensor modification for the Sony a7II. The series starts here.

The Leica 50mm f/1.4 Summilux-M ASPH doesn’t do well in the corners on the a7II, and, although it does somewhat better on the Kolari-modified camera, it’s not a good match. How does the Kolari thin stack on the a7II compare with the Leica M240 with that lens attached to each? Both cameras have 24 MP. Neither camera has an AA filter. The Leica has special angled micro lenses, and camera firmware that reads a 6 bit code off the lens and performs optimization based on the lens model number. That should give the Leica camera an advantage. How does that play out in the real world?

The scene at f/8 with both cameras. I focused on the center with live view with both cameras. With the Leica M240, that’s the only option. Maybe I’m stacking the deck against the a7II, but I figured it would be cheating to use the put-the-focus-point-anywhere feature of the Sony to focus in the corner.

Both images were developed in Lightroom with the default settings, except that the white balance was set to daylight. Lens profiles were turned off. Lightroom does some lens-dependent sharpening that is not defeatable, however. Lr knows what lens is on the Leica, and it has no idea what lens is on the a7II because the adapter doesn’t provide it with that information. Let’s look at the center at 3:1 enlargement to make sure that Lr is not stacking the deck in favor of one of the cameras.

Except for the white balance difference, they look the same to me, although there seems to be a bit more contrast in the Kolari image.

Now let’s look at the lower left corner at all the whole apertures that the lens can use. I brightened the corners by one stop to compensate for lens falloff.