Zeiss perfection...100mm f2

[biggles3]

There are some lenses which simply excel - their reputations, hard earned, simply never dim. One such is the Contax Zeiss 100mm f2 T* Planar.

I bought one in the early 1980s as part of a sports book project, along with a number of Zeiss' fastest lenses. It's edge-to-edge sharpness, even illumination and high contrast remain hard to better even today so I decided to see if it could pass muster with today's digital sensors. I popped it onto a Fuji GFX 50S using a Fotodiox Pro adapter and grabbed a few snaps - a 50Mp sensor should be a tough test.

The image of the end-of-season blackberry bush is an 80% crop from the original as the file size was far too large to upload but I think you can see the quality of the lens. The hand-held shot on a very cold morning was taken at 1/250s, f2 and at ISO800. One of the benefits of f2 is the shallowness of the dof which has helped isolate the berries from the rest of the image.

The photo of the lens shows it attached to a Contax AX - always a winning combination.
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