Zeiss Tele-Tessar 85/4? What the heck?

I missed that thing about minimum focus .9 meters...pass...I have hit that barrier too many times with other lenses, even though people will mention there is little dof there I would not have a lens that didnt have it.
 
I'm very surprised to see even this much interest. F4 max for a 'portrait' lens? And, if you need to stop it down a bit for a bit of 'edge,' you're looking at 5.6.... DOF-wise, may as well be shooting with a small-sensored digital compact. Alright, i exaggerate a bit, but.... I don't even have medium format lenses that are this slow.

Seems like the market is saturated with normal and fast glass, so the manufacturers are going slow (Leica, with its Summarits, too) just to put more products on the shelves. Choice is good, sure. But, how many of these things can they sell? Their only hope is that people flock to it because of some fabled 'classic imaging' characteristics, like they did with the Sonnar-C 50/1.5. I wonder if the focus shift 'feature' will be enabled in the Tele-Tessar. Bonus!
 
Who would have thought that the venerable 90/4 Elmar revives like that ?

I bit big if you ask me ....

Roland.
 
Why not Planar to pair with that very expensive Sonnar? I have been reading in places that Tessar is generally inferior to Planar? Is it to keep the cost "low"?
 
maybe it is dark, but there are many people here who love tessar design so this is aimed to them. i love tessar look and im sad because there are no new tessars. because of that i am considering to buy and saving money for heliar classic for a last few months because it is very close design to tessar.
only reason this doesnt interest me is because i dont like longer lenses.
 
OMG, a 85mm at f4. I guessed wrong yet again. Pushing the performance envelope, I think not. Zeiss could do a f2.8 in their sleep, so why a f4 and a .9m minimum focus distance. At least they have a new 21mm f2.8 in ZF mount.
 
Where can I read about Tessar design vs. Planar? The easiest debate on Zeiss optics is probably on Sonnar vs. Plannar.
 
I have enough trouble focusing my f/3.5 CV 90mm to want an f/2.8, so I don't see f/4 as such a bad thing. DoF is plenty shallow at that aperture on a longer lens, too. If it's a potent performer (and priced better than 700 Euros over here), I'd consider one.
 
I'm sure it will be an excellent portrait lens and I like the Tessar look in my TLR. I just don't see how they can charge so much for a slow 4-element lens.
 
I think this lens is meant more for a "traveller" photography, where an f4.0 on an 85mm lens would be a minimum anyway, it is to be seen if this is compensated by compactness and lightness too. BTW, the Tessar has never been a champion of sharpness at f2.8, so it may be that making it an f4.0 lens, it will be optically good right from the wide open. What I like a lot about Tessars is the bokeh and an extremely marked 3d rendering - we will see how it is when the lens comes out, but I'd be very tempted to swap it for my flary Elmarit 90...
 
very cool . it is one of very few Zeiss lenses Im interested to test. I have TLR with Tessar 3.8 so it would be interesting to test this and see if it is good companion with my cron preasph. I think it is a bit unnecessary to have both 90 2.8 and 2.0 so why not 2.0 and 4.0 intstead so I can use 4.0 as lightweight daylight lens 😛 An excuse of having more lenses for me, a silly tech freak 😀
 
Please excuse me for being terribly rude, but are you people stupid?

Rangefinders don't need bright lenses beacuse you do not focus through the lens.

Lenses that are fast are bigger and heavier.

Slower lenses are not as 'unsharp' wide open as fast lenses are. Shooting a modern f2.8 lens at f5.6 or an f4 lens at f5.6 will give the same sharpness (or close enough).

Do portrait lenses need to be sharp as hell anyway? You probably won't be putting your camera on a tripod...
 
nzeeman said:
maybe it is dark, but there are many people here who love tessar design so this is aimed to them. i love tessar look and im sad because there are no new tessars. because of that i am considering to buy and saving money for heliar classic for a last few months because it is very close design to tessar.
only reason this doesnt interest me is because i dont like longer lenses.
Click to expand...

This is a tele-tessar not a tessar. These are quite different lens designs. You can read a bit here (from the horse's mouth): http://www.zeiss.com/c12567a8003b58b9/Contents-Frame/f39d17ddf7e6e652c12570fb00491418

Tele-Tessar lenses are typically lighter in weight than the Sonnar/Ernostar lenses which is what Zeiss choose for the 90/2.8 for the Contax G. It will interesting to see the optical construstion and how light&small it is.

Having written this, I would have thought an f/2.8 design would have made more sense. The Contax-G lens is still pretty small and light and I use the f/2.8 quite often, to keep the shutter time short (1/500s). I am not really an available light kind of guy, but an f/4 lens would clearly not be as useful to me as the f/2.8 I own. My WA lenses typically don't go to fully open (about f/5.6 most of the time).

Another thing Zeiss increasingly does, is to use the classical names Sonnar and Tessar for marketing purposes. The optical design has little resemblance with the classic design. Tessar gets used for the lower quality ones, Sonnar for the higher quality ones. This mostly concerns digicams. I hope this one is not affected (perhaps I should say infected 😀). At €700 or so this one is not particularly cheap.
 
Wimpler said:
You probably won't be putting your camera on a tripod...
Click to expand...

That's what I need the f/2.8 for, to keep the shutter at 1/500s since I am mostly not using the heavy tripod 😀. Carrying a heavy tripod defeats the purpose of a light weight ranger 😱
 
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