Zeiss made its long-awaited return to the traditional photography space by reintroducing its beloved Otus series for full-frame mirrorless cameras. The Otus ML 50mm f/1.4 and Otus ML 85mm f/1.4 lenses channel a classic, manual-focus photographic workflow that most first-party lenses eschew in favor of clinical sharpness, digital lens corrections, and perhaps most notably, blazing-fast autofocus. For Zeiss, this is the Otus ML’s strength, not its weakness.
Speaking with PetaPixel at CP+ just two days after unveiling its Otus ML lenses, Petra Visuri, Product Manager of Photography and Mobile Imaging, Zeiss Photonics and optics (PNO), says the new Otus ML lenses are spiritually similar to the popular Otus lenses for DSLR cameras, but the move to a mirrorless age provides Zeiss more flexibility.
“So for the Otus DSLR lenses, it was about the highest optical performance, excellent quality, and low sample variation,” Visuri explains. “And this principle we carried into Otus ML. But of course, the mirrorless camera systems offer us more room to maneuver.”
The move to mirrorless cameras has also necessitated a shrinking of the Otus series. “We had to bring this same experience and same magical images to a compact and lightweight form,” Visuri says.
Consider the Zeiss Otus 85mm f/1.4 ZF.2 for Nikon F ($4,490) against the new Otus ML 85mm f/1.4 for Nikon Z ($2,999). Beyond the aesthetic differences between the two lenses — the Otus ML series embraces a more angular design and weather sealing at the mount — the new Otus ML prime is six millimeters (0.2 inches) shorter and weighs about 80 grams (2.8 ounces) less. Of course, the new Otus ML 85mm f/1.4 is still 419 grams (14.8 ounces) heavier than the Sony 85mm f/1.4 GM II ($1,798) and nine millimeters (0.35 inches) longer.
However, there is a significant difference between Zeiss’ approach and its Otus ML lenses compared to the Sony 85mm f/1.4 GM II or any comparable fast primes from Canon or Nikon. Those companies utilize digital lens corrections to varying degrees to extract the best possible optical performance from their lenses while keeping their sizes and weights to a minimum. There is plenty of debate about whether this is a good thing or not. Still, it is entirely standard practice in the mirrorless age, and it helps companies deliver remarkable imaging performance.
For its part, Zeiss says “no thank you” to digital lens corrections.
“With the Otus way, we are not relying on any of those. That’s part of the design goal,” Visuri tells PetaPixel, with a hint of pride. “Of course, the modern cameras nowadays, they do some kind of in-camera correction for distortion and colors. Sometimes they also make the lens appear sharper than it actually is.”
“In one way, it’s fair. If it makes the job of the photographer easier, that’s fine. But when we design the design intention and also the goal we want to achieve, what we want to preserve with Otus and the new Otus ML family is that we do not need to rely on those corrections.”
Arguably, this is not the only area where Zeiss is not necessarily concerned with making the job of the photographer easier. The Otus ML lenses, like their predecessors, are entirely manual focus.
The new Otus ML lenses feature a refined manual focusing experience compared to their DSLR fore-bearers, including a fully metal focusing ring. It promises smooth, silent, and precise manual focus control.
“The primary advantage [of manual focus] is that you control your story creation,” Zeiss explains. “You decide what it is you want to see in focus, the focus and depth of it. You control your story.”
This level of direct control, where a photographer’s precise rotation of the focus ring makes the focus distance exactly one thing or another, is more unusual in the mirrorless age. Many lenses — not all, but most — are focus-by-wire. This means that a photographer’s input on the focus ring is not mechanically linked to the focusing optics inside the lens but instead to electronics that move the lenses to achieve focus. This has some benefits, including customizable focus ring behavior, but has drawbacks, including an often sloppy or unresponsive focusing experience.
For Zeiss, keeping the focus fully mechanical means providing photographers with consistent, precise control over their images. With the ever-improving manual focus assists available in mirrorless cameras, like the ability to zoom through the electronic viewfinder and utilize focus peaking, the Otus ML promises an even better manual focusing experience than the original Otus lenses.
The Zeiss Otus ML lenses promise more than a relatively old-school photographic experience, complete with mechanical manual focus and no digital lens corrections, they also promise a more vintage-inspired “look and feel.”
“What we would like to achieve is to maintain the same, not only the appearance, but the feel of using the Otus family,” Visuri says.
Zeiss has a rich history. Carl Zeiss opened an optics workshop in Jena, Germany, way back in 1846. While Zeiss was making microscopes then, the company quickly moved into photography. Zeiss invented its famed Planar lens in 1896, and by World War I, Zeiss was the world’s largest camera manufacturer, and cameras needed lenses.
The point of that trip down memory lane is that Zeiss has been in photography through many technical evolutions and eras, and much has changed.
“I remember when there was the transition from analog to digital. That was a challenging time because that drastically changed how people view their images,” Visuri says. “I would say from optical design, and also for the overall lenses, there are different objectives, what to focus on, and what to correct. Suddenly, in the digital age, you have the [ability] to look at the pixel level.”
Zeiss does consider this pursuit of “clinical sharpness” that some photographers are beginning to decry, but “it’s questionable whether this is the balance we want to have,” Zeiss says of chasing extreme sharpness.
“For us, you have a photograph, you have a certain vision in mind of what you want to capture. We want to enable you to capture that in the way you saw it with the colors as they are in real life, the sharpness, and so on,” Zeiss explains.
This ultimately means that the Zeiss Otus ML lenses are not the absolute sharpest optics, but that was not the goal. Consistency, reliability, and control are the goals, and Zeiss is confident it has met them with its highly anticipated new Otus ML lenses for full-frame mirrorless cameras.
“We have this long history, and all that history informed the Otus ML. We all know the market has changed, and we took time to understand how we can help photographers differentiate themselves from the mass of taps on the display or clicks on the camera — create unique images. That took time, and now we have the Otus ML,” Visuri explains.
“If photography is your passion, and you want to excel in your craft, the Otus ML is the kind of lens that helps you do that,” Zeiss concludes.
Source link
