Canon 50mm/0.95-Noctilux-Nikkor 50mm/1.1

raid

raid

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I would like to concentrate on three ultra-fast 50mm lenses in this thread:
1. Canon 50mm/0.95
2. Leitz Noctilux 50mm/1.0
3. Nikkor 50mm/1.1

Each of these three lenses is expensive, and each is magnificently designed and built. I tried these lenses out in my comparison of about twenty five 50mm lenses. It was a real thrill to hold such lenses and to use them.

After completing ten rolls of film and spending long hours designing and then executing the lens testing, it is time to compare a few lenses side by side with the goal to provide some useful conclusions to RFF members.

I will start out by loading up one good image taken wide open by each lens, followed with additional images taken at other apertures. If you happen to use any of these three lenses, please enrichen this thread with your own discussions and images.

The Canon 50mm/0.95 can only be used on a Canon 7 or 7s unless it is custom modified for other mounts. It is a big and heavy lens. Quite often you see such a lens on sale. Sometimes, it is a lens that is made for use on a TV camera, and then a custom modification is needed to be able to use it on a Canon or Leica.

The Noctilux is a newer design than the Canon 50mm/0.95 and it is beautifully made. I had no trouble using this lens hand-held on a Leica M3. With the Bessa T I had trouble focusing well.

The Nikkor 50mm/1.1 is a rare lens, and it is also beautifully built. The lens that I got from Kiu was meant for use with a Nikon body, but it gave out of focus images, so I used it instead with a Bessa R2C. Surprisingly, image sthen became sharper. Maybe the extra shimming did the trick.

My use of these three lenses was very limited time wise,and I am sure that owners of these lenses can provide better examples than I can.

Frm left to right we have:

Photo 1: Nikkor 50mm1.1 @ 1.1 .............. loaner from Kiu
Photo 2: Noctilux 50mm/1.0 @ 1.0.............. loaner from Fred
Photo 3: Canon 50mm/0.95 @ 0.95 ........... loaner from Mark


Raid
 

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  • Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 1.1 for RFF.jpg
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  • Noctilux 1.0 at 1.0 (3) for RFF.JPG
    Noctilux 1.0 at 1.0 (3) for RFF.JPG
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  • Canon 50mm 0.95 @ 0.95 for RFF.jpg
    Canon 50mm 0.95 @ 0.95 for RFF.jpg
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Jim: When pointing the cursor on any image, it will display the information needed. I went back and now have listed the information too.

Raid
 
I was lucky to have received from Mark, Fred, and Kiu these lenses forthe testing. Each lens is amazing. It is a really good feeling to have that I could use such a lens wide open if needed but also at larger apertures. I basically neglected testing at smaller apertures and I shot mostly with thelenses wide open. I have examples taken at 1.4, 2.0 and 4.0.

Depth of field is extremely shallow when using such lenses wide open. It is pretty much a choice between getting the eye lashes in focus or the nose or ...


Raid
 
Here are three photos taken with the Nikkor 50mm/1.1 at 1.4, 2.0 and 4.0. This lens gets very sharp quite quickly after closing the lens slightly down.

It should be noted that this lens seems to have delicate aperture blades, and more than one RFF member asked me to treat the lens gently when rotating the aperture ring.


From left to right:


1. @ 1.4
2. @ 2.0
2. @ 4.0


Raid
 

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  • Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 1.4 for RFF.jpg
    Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 1.4 for RFF.jpg
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  • Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 2.0 for RFF.jpg
    Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 2.0 for RFF.jpg
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  • Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 4.0 for RFF.jpg
    Nikkor 50mm 1.1 @ 4.0 for RFF.jpg
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Raid,

Thank you for your time and dedication. You're doing a great job with these lens tests.

Just one little point. There is a slight bias in the first three pictures of this comparison, as the framing is not the same. As you know, these ultra fast lenses, when used wide open, exhibit fair resolution only in the very center of the frame, due to field curvature/sperical aberration. The corners are always very soft. If you look at image #3 (Canon), you will see that the face is right in the middle, while in image #1 (Nikkor), it is more to the left and the face in image #2 (Noctilux) is in the upper left corner.

For example, it is quite obvious that the hair on the right side of the face in image #1 is much sharper than the hair on the left side. Being at the same distance from film plane, the difference in sharpness is only due to uneven sharpness across the field.

While these picture are very useful for comparing the features of the lenses, and especially the rendering and bokeh, I wouldn't recommend to use them to assess sharpness.

Cheers,

Abbazz
 
Abbazz: Your point is well taken, and I appreciate such comments. I have a target sheet that I took photos of, and there should be no bias there. I also have often replicate images for the lenses, so maybe I can find other images.

It was too hectic with 25 lenses. If I had only these three lenses to compare,and maybe throw in the Canon 50/1.2, the testing would be better and more complete.

Abbazz, here is an image taken with the Noctilux wide open. One of my daughters is nearly centered here,but the camera is now an M3 and the photo is hand-held.

http://photo.net/photodb/photo?topic_id=1481&msg_id=00JMY8&photo_id=5403806&photo_sel_index=0


Here is a photo taken with the Nikkor 50mm/1.1 @ 1.1and my daughter's face is centered.

http://www.photo.net/photodb/photo?photo_id=5403348


Raid
 
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Am I wacky, or is Raid's M3 wacky, or does the Nikkor image really look significantly crisper than the Noctilux image?

Maybe the Nikkor's high price isn't only because of its rarity after all!

As someone else noted, it's hard to make direct comparisons among all three lenses because the test images aren't consistent, but I'm not going to kick too much. The shots do give what seems to be a pretty good idea of the "character" of each lens.

Incidentally, from extensive experience with the 50/0.95 Canon lens, I know that the lateral blurs seen in the outer zones of the image clean up quite a lot if you stop it down even slightly; I'm guessing that if you set it to f/1.1, its images would look more similar to those of the Nikkor lens.
 
Conventional wisdom should expect better results from a 3500 USD lens than from a 700 USD one.
Theory as well. The Nikkor is made of 9 elements, the Canon of 7. Instead of making a complete new design they have overstretched the 1.2/50 design just a little bit more.
Whereas the Nikkor-N based on a 1930' patent of A.W.Tronnier who never has calculated a real bad lens anyway.
Some good people have proved here that the Canon 0.95 isn't a bad lens either. I think many more are used to photograph than of the Nikkor 1.1's, which value banned them into the showcase.
 
Raid,
If you hit "manage attachments" after you upload your images you can put labels on individual images and place them anywhere in the text instead of just posting them as a label-less group.
 
Sonnar2 said:
Conventional wisdom should expect better results from a 3500 USD lens than from a 700 USD one.
Theory as well. The Nikkor is made of 9 elements, the Canon of 7.
Click to expand...

I'm not sure where you got those price numbers, but "conventional wisdom" can't overlook the role of volume. The Nikkor was designed to be a very limited-production lens, so unit price had to be set high accordingly. Canon intended for its 50/0.95 to be a lens that would sell in quantity, and it did, allowing a lower unit price.

Theory aside, the number of elements isn't always an indicator of lens quality. The Canon is a later design and was able to take advantage of high-index glasses that were not available when the Nikkor was designed. (That's also why the six-element Canon 50mm f/1.4 performs at least as well as the seven-element 50/1.4 Nikkor.) Both these Canon lenses also used very aggressive curvatures on some of the interior elements, which must have been challenging to make; I can see why many conservative manufacturers would have preferred to boost the element count instead.

Finally, we can't overlook the role of sample-to-sample variation, which is still larger than many photographers realize and was even larger in the '50s and early '60s, particularly with ultra-speed and other "extreme" lens types.

Anyway, this was an interesting exercise... although considering that we're looking at low-resolution images on monitors, nothing more than that. It's not often that we get to see pictures made with a 50/1.1 Nikkor at all, so the results are worth seeing just for that.

As you say, it's been shown that all these lenses can produce good images. What I find especially striking is that at first blush, the modern Noctilux doesn't seem to show more of a clear-cut improvement over the oldies... although the test pictures don't really stress areas where it might be expected to be better, such as flare control.
 
I wil take more photos this week [maybe tonight] with the Noctilux on a tripod to make sure that I get sharp images. The other lenses for Mark and Kiu already have been packed up for mail, so I won't be able to take more photos with them myself, but Mark and Kiu can do this later when they get their lenses back if this is what they want to do.

For all practical purposes, all three lenses here are great lenses. It is amazing that old lenses can compete with new lenses.

Raid

Raid
 
Question for Raid and/or Kiu -- was the Nikkor you tested the LTM version, or the internal S-mount, or external S-mount? I've never even seen a picture of the LTM version, so if someone's got one, please post!
 
Hi Jim,
you're right with the volume vs. price. I've never seen a reliable production figure of the 0.95/50 it is probably 10x or more the 3,300 figure of the Nikkor-N.
Also I'm among the firsts to second your statement that most bad oppinions about the sharpness of the 0.95/50 is based on poor handling, precision, or conversion. A cudgel for the 0.95/50! That's one reason why I linked to your ballet picture page.

About the newer glass. I'm not sure. Nikon uses lanthan glass with refractive index=1,717 according to patent 2828671 (1957) whereas Canon claimed the 1.2/50 (1956) with 1,74 glass. For the 0.95 I haven't found a patent yet - from Canon. Probably you are right. But just for the diagram, the elements surounding the diaphragm are most bent on the Canon 0.95 than with any other lenses I've ever seen, except in some patent writings of Lee and others in the 1920's, 1930's. Even for me as a non-Mathematics it's clear that such bending of glass cannot be good for any correcting optical errors... 😱

And RAID, please go ahead with the tests... I like it!
 
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jlw said:
Question for Raid and/or Kiu -- was the Nikkor you tested the LTM version, or the internal S-mount, or external S-mount? I've never even seen a picture of the LTM version, so if someone's got one, please post!
Click to expand...

The Nikkor that I got from Kiu is supposedly meant to be used on a Nikon S-mount camera, but it gave me unsharp images until I mounted it on a Bessa R2C with contax mount. I don't know how the internal-S and external-S mounts differ.

Raid
 
The internal-mount lens has a narrow end that slides into the built-in focus helical of the Nikon/Contax camera. So an internally mounted lens has just the glass and f/stop adjustment, no focus helical at all. This proved to be too heavy a lens for the inner mount, so later 1.1 lenses were external mounts, using wider rear end to attach to the outer bayonet of the camera. The external lenses almost certainly would probably have a separate focus helical built into them and would, in any event, more resemble a modern lens mount. They would lock and unlock with an approximately .5cm metal square lever on the outside edge of the lens mount. The internal mount would lock with a tiny metal tab on the lens that clicks into place inside the on-camera lens mount. This is a springy piece of thin metal that can be bent/pressed down to unlock the lens.
 
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