|
SLR Magic Hyperprime LM CINE 50mm T/0.95 on Sony NEX - Review / Test Report - Analysis |
|
Lens Reviews -
Sony NEX
|
|
Page 2 of 3
Distortion
The SLRMagic lens produces a slight amount of barrel distortion (0.7%). This may be just visible in critical scenes but it’s not really disturbing.
Vignetting
The 50mm T/0.95 is a full format M-mount lens with an optimized vignetting characteristic compared to the Leica Noctilux (using a bigger front element). On the APS-C format NEX 7 it produces only a medium amount of vignetting at T/0.95 and the issue is basically gone by f/2.
MTF (resolution)
SLR Magic told us that the lens has been designed to deliver superior center resolution and contrast at large aperture settings. We can mostly confirm this. The center is already very good at f/0.95 although you can spot a slight weakness in contrast here. Stopping down pushes the center into excellent levels from f/2 to f/8. However, the borders and corners are not a similarly impressive success story. They are very weak at large apertures and improve only gradually on a low level the more you stop down. The outer regions are only decent from f/5.6 onward so there is room for improvement here (although the difficult NEX 7 sensor doesn’t make things any easier here for sure).
Please note that the MTF results are not directly comparable across the different systems!
Below is a simplified summary of the formal findings. The chart shows line widths per picture height (LW/PH) which can be taken as a measure for sharpness.
If you want to know more about the MTF50 figures you may check out the corresponding Imatest Explanations
Chromatic Aberrations (CAs)
Lateral CAs (color shadows at the image borders) are very well controlled especially considering the high pixel density of the NEX 7. They stay around 1px on the average which is certainly very good within this testing scope.
Bokeh
A primary aspect of such an extreme aperture lens is the quality of the bokeh (out-of-focus rendition) and the SLR Magic lens delivers quite nicely here.
The background blur (to the left below) is pretty smooth with only a slight amount of smearing whereas the foreground blur is somewhat more nervous.
Out-of-focus highlights are very well rendered with unusually smooth edges. The circular shape remains intact even when stopping down to f/2.8 (on APS-C format - on full format you will notice cat's eyes towards the corners). The inner highlight zone is slightly nervous in the very center of the highlight disc though.
Bokeh Fringing / Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations (LoCA)
Bokeh fringing is a common issue with fast glass. It's visible as halos of different colors in out-of-focus areas - magenta (red + blue) in front of the focus point and green beyond.
We expected a heavy amount of bokeh fringing at very large aperture settings but they effect is not that pronounced. You can spot some fringing at T/0.95 and f/1.4 for sure but the issue is not excessive and basically gone beyond f/2.
|
Move the mouse cursor over the f-stop marks below to observe the respective LoCAs
|
| T/0.95 |
f/1.4 |
f/2 |
f/2.8 |
|
|
|
