Is ZEISS owned by Sony?

Some factors that typically affect the bokeh of a lens will be the number and grouping of its optical elements, the amount of aperture blades it has, and whether those blades are rounded. The Sony Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 lens uses Zeiss’ Distagon optical formula. This is a type of retrofocus design — also called inverted telelens — pioneered by Carl Zeiss in the 1950s. Distagon designs be able to produce wide angle lenses while still maintaining a large distance between the rear element and the image plane, which helps correct distortion.
Simply put, if you’re not getting sharp images with this lens, you’re doing something amiss. The center is impressively sharp even at f/1.4, and gets razor-like by f/2.

Spherochromatism can be present, but it’s never too pronounced. Out of focus areas beyond the plane of focus often display green fringes, while areas while watching plane of focus display magenta fringes. Spherochromatism also goes away completely as you stop down the lens and can be easily corrected in post. Due to this fact, native color rendition, contrast, and rendering have grown to be slightly less relevant than they used to be. Fringes and onion rings in the highlights are kept to a minimum despite the use of aspherical elements, which is also impressive. I don’t know what Sony and Zeiss did to obtain this lens to deliver such smooth and creamy bokeh, but I’m certinly not complaining. The 35mm f/1.4 lens is virtually silent while focusing, that makes it perfect for all purposes, including video recording.
Zeiss produces manual focus Milvus lenses for the Nikon F-mount (ZF.2) and Canon EF lens mount , covering the 35mm format. The 15/2.8, 21/2.8, 35/2, 50/2, 100/2, and 135/2 are carried over from the prior Z-series . ZS lenses fit the M42 lens mount (Pentacon/Practica/Pentax screw mount). Carl Zeiss AG has long been renowned for its motion picture lenses. Zeiss manufactures prime and zoom lenses for 35mm, 16mm, and 65mm film production. They also make lenses for digital cinema and hi-def video.

  • By forming an alliance, Sony and Zeiss aimed to greatly help address each other’s weaknesses.
  • At least, the younger photographers among us have better comprehension.
  • interesting.

ZEISS certifies the suppliers and all the equipment that’s needed to ensure product quality, like the equipment of third-party suppliers. Zeiss has manufactured coordinate measuring machines since 1919, offering very basic manually operated CMMs. In 1973, Zeiss introduced the UMM 500, using a Zeiss sensor system and Hewlett-Packard computer. A unique triplet of ultra-fast 50 mm f /0.7 lenses originally created by Zeiss for NASA’s lunar program had the distinction to be reused by Stanley Kubrick in the filming of his historical drama Barry Lyndon.
This is perfectly normal and, in this case, I actually enjoy the effect it introduces generally in most of my images. As with most lenses, vignetting cleans up nicely as you stop down the aperture. By focusing on the corners you can see that the lens is really sharp, but then you’ll probably get a slightly out of focus center. There’s no way around this, but you shouldn’t even see this in real-world usage, unless you spend your days taking pictures of brick walls and then pixel-peeping the results. In this mode, focus peaking is activated by default, nevertheless, you can set the camera to utilize magnification instead.

  • So while I don’t doubt your claim that ex-Minolta engineers could be responsible for the designs, Zeiss seems to have given them green light to utilize existing designs and must be partially collaborating with them.
  • Xperia 1.
  • Because of its high speed, it was used extensively readily available cameras.
  • ED indicates that a lens uses ‘Extra-low Dispersion’ glass, a technology that allows the production of lenses that significantly reduce chromatic aberration.

There is physically no difference between the APS-C and full-frame E-mount itself, the lenses are simply just made to resolve different image sizes. Sony uses this “one mount” system as a selling point and differentiator from its competitors. Initially, Sony A-mount lenses were designed for APS-C format DSLRs and were mostly rebranded Minolta lenses.

Similar Posts