Voigtlander Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical (on Sony NEX) - Review / Lab Test Report
Lens Reviews - Sony Alpha/NEX (APS-C)
Article Index
Introduction
Analysis

Review by Klaus Schroiff, published November 2010

Introduction

Normally we don't review discontinued lenses anymore but you may forgive me this one. Recently I acquired a Voigtläander Nokton 50mm f/1.5 Aspherical and I was, of course, curious about its technical performance. It can be used on a Sony NEX via a Leica M39 to Sony NEX adapter.

Such adapted lenses can only be used with manual focusing and "working aperture" - there's no data coupling whatsoever here. The field-of-view is equivalent to about 75mm and in terms of depth-of-field it behaves like a f/2.1 lens in this scope - a rather obvious solution for portrait photography for instance. If you look around you should be able to find this lens for about 300EUR/US$ on the used market.

It's a full-metal construction built to very high standards. The focus ring operates very smooth (dampened). The lens extends marginally when focusing towards shorter distances. Typical for adapted lenses, a change of the aperture setting is applied immediately so you can check the effect on the depth-of-field on your screen (without the darkening like when stopping down a DSLR with a conventional optical viewfinder). The lens is supplied with a screw-in metal lens hood.

Manual focusing may sound like a major annoyance but it is not that bad actually. On Sony NEX cameras you can easily switch to a magnified focus view so accurate manual focusing is real simple unless you try to track a moving object of course. We thus recommend this camera-lens combination for static scenes only.

Specifications
Equiv. focal length75 mm (full format equivalent)
Equiv. aperturef/2.3 (full format equivalent, in terms of depth-of-field)
Optical construction6 elements in 5 groups inc. 1x aspherical element
Number of aperture blades10
min. focus distance0.9 m (max. magnification ratio 1:?)
Dimensions45 x 58 mm
Weight243 g
Filter size52 mm (non-rotating)
Hoodsupplied, screw-in, barrel-shaped
Other features-



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