sonyalpharumorsLog in

I’m with you daemur. I think it’s ridiculous that Zeiss hasn’t designed (and released) both a better 35mm f/1.4 as well as a better 50mm f/1.4 than the Minolta versions, cause neither Minolta designs are sharp enough wide open for use with a 24+ Megapixel digital sensor. It shows a real lack of commitment to the A-Mount on both the part of Zeiss and of course also on the part of Sony. I can only hope that both a 35mm and this rumoured 50mm finally do come to market before Sony stops selling native A-Mount cameras. Cause those two primes would make the system relatively “complete” for serious portrait photographers. And if they do “complete the system” I’d be willing to bet that both the A-Mount Zeiss primes and Sony’s a900 and a850 bodies will develop a cult status 10-15 years down the road, not at all unlike the way that Contax 645 AF film bodies and Zeiss medium format primes have. And to those who say that people like me should switch to Canon or Nikon… I’d say that there’s nothing wrong with backing the wrong horse. I’m not looking to own the camera system that turns out to be the market leader for the longest time. I’m looking to create excellent photographs.

Perhaps that is why the lens is so slow being released… Is the project stillborn because the top of the line A mount is already dead?

The money for an a99 continues to sit in my bank account. I don’t envisage being able to afford to swap systems in a couple of years if the A mount is dead, so, much as I would love to buy the a99 I’m holding off untill I see some kind of comitment from Sony.

Orly…? What makes you think it’s the same old design? Both 85ZA and 135ZA were different and far better than their Contax predecessors. The 24ZA (and none of the zooms) had comparable counterparts either.

News Flash… All ZA’s are unique designs for the Alpha mount. No doubt the best marketing strategy that either company could engineer. The competition doesn’t want comparison to the ZE/ZF.

Roni wrote: “This lens is the same 1.4 planar from the ZE/ZF mounts and is the same design as the old Contax Yashica 50mm 1.4. A good lens, but you can go on ebay and get old CY manual versions of this lens for $300. Or newer models of the same design for ZE/ZF for $700.”

Why do you make such claims when you obviously don’t know anything about these lenses?

The Sony Alpha Carl Zeiss Planar T* 1.4/50mm ZA SSM (SAL-50F14Z) is a new lens design:

According to Zeiss, the lens will have eight elements in five groups including three kitted groups. It will feature two aspherical glass surfaces. Both, the front and the rear group move during focusing. According to Bertram Hönlinger the aperture plane will move as well, however, this could not be seen in the lens diagrams presented during the Zeiss presentation in September 2012. For more details (including cut lens diagrams):

http://www.mi-fo.de/forum/index.php?showtopic=32521&view=findpost&p=291545
http://www.dyxum.com/dforum/help-want-a99-but-scared-to-leave-canon_topic92685_post1094286.html#1094286

Note, that the ZA lens above is very different from the Carl Zeiss Distagon T* 1.4/55mm ZF, which was also announced at photokina.

So, unless Sony and Zeiss changed the design of the SAL-50F14Z in the past few months, we can expect that the figures above are accurate.

Matthias