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You are here: Home / The Last Word / Zeiss 85mm f/1.8 Batis — walkabout

Zeiss 85mm f/1.8 Batis — walkabout

February 11, 2016 JimK 1 Comment

I went for a walk this morning with the a7RII and the Zeiss 85mm f/1.8 Batis. I’ll show you some pix, but first I want to say what a great fit this lens is for the a7x bodies. It’s not a big lens, but it’s not tiny. It doesn’t stick out in front of the camera as much as you’d expect, which is nice. But the greatest thing is that it is very light. It’s the opposite of the 90 ‘cron; when you pick that lens up, you’re surprise by how much it weighs, but when you pick up the Batis, you’re impressed by how light it is.

And, as far as I’m concerned weight trumps size in photography. I don’t mind carrying a somewhat bigger bag if it’s lighter.

The first thing I’ll show you is my solar array/distortion tester with the lens wide open:

_DSC7065

There’s no Lr lens correction in this or and other image in this post except the one immediately below. The distortion appears to be of the pincushion variety, and not strong.

Turning lens correction on helps:

_DSC7065-2

Why does it make the image brighter? Beats me.

Next, let’s look at a strongly backlit f/5.6 image:

_DSC6971

Zooming in on a hard edge:

_DSC6971-2

Is there green fringing? Hard to say.

Putting the sun is a place that often causes odd diaphragm images shows no problem at f/4.

_DSC6953

That odd shape in the lower center is a cloud.

At f/4 in extreme circumstances, flare is visible, but the lens basically behaves quite well.

_DSC6946-2

Before the walk, I had to make an image of the sunrise, such as it was.

_DSC6904

Zooming in on the lower left show sharp results:

_DSC6905

Is there any fringing? If there is, it’s not much.

Starting up a hill, lead by my traveling companion and shooting at f/4.

_DSC6960

Bella is a McNabb Border Collie, and looks good zoomed in:

_DSC6960-2

Upper left:

_DSC6960-3

Lower right:

_DSC6960-4

Some DOF problems at that aperture, apparently, but no fringing.

This has been a good year for shooting stars. Here we look at them at f/6.3, which is pushing it for DOF, but this is a lens test:

_DSC7038

The lower corners:

_DSC7038-2

_DSC7038-3

Next, we’ll see how the lens does on some test charts.

The Last Word

← Zeiss 85mm f/1.8 Batis — color fringing Another medium tele test — LaCA →

Comments

  1. Toh says

    February 14, 2016 at 8:28 am

    Hi Jim – I also noticed that my Lightroom default correction for the Batis also brightened both the center and the edges. Maybe the goal is to bring the effective t-stop to whatever f-stop the photographer had set?

    Reply

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