I’ve been on a bit of a Zeiss kick here lately, partly because I genuinely appreciate their products, but mostly because they continue to innovate and provide new glass for their customers. Earlier this week we took delivery of the Zeiss 135mm T2.1 CP.2 which marked the first time Zeiss released a lens as a CP.2 before releasing it as a ZF.2 or ZE. I’ll be sure to put some tests of the 135mm up soon, it’s an impressive tele-prime to say the least. This brings me to todays topic. The ZF.2 lenses that the CP.2 primes are based on are still being produced in quantity and Zeiss continues to add focal lengths and updates older designs on a regular basis. There’s certainly no sign of them slowing down. However, if you pay attention to the inter-webs, you’d have noticed rumors and results of their new 55mm Distagon floating around. Continue reading “The Future of Zeiss DSLR Lenses”
Zeiss has been on a roll over the past few years. Their ZF.2 lenses became an overdue success and with those came the Compact Primes CP.2 and the Light Weight Zoom LWZ. They’ve recently announced their short line of high speed CP.2 lenses deemed Super Speeds as well as their new 70-200mm Cine-Zoom and even a range of professional anamorphic primes at NAB this year. Their product line-up just gets better and better with no hint of stopping anytime soon. 
Not exactly the most unique lens to be introduced in the past decade. What a boring focal length, 25mm… The current 25mm ZF is an f/2.8 and really doesn’t do anything special except make clean images. It doesn’t perform really well in low light, it’s not some crazy wide focal length, and it doesn’t even focus automatically for you or stabilize your image. You might think, hasn’t this been done over and over again? Not really. Zeiss knows that people are carefully criticizing their ZF/ZE line of lenses these days. With all the attention they are getting for motion picture use, Zeiss is really stepping up the quality of their lenses. Some of their current line-up is what I would consider sub-exotic, like the current 25mm f/2.8. This new lens, with it’s dual aspherical element design, practically eliminates chromatic aberrations and distortion, according to Zeiss. I don’t usually believe press release claims especially when the samples provided are absolutely useless… But Zeiss isn’t usually one to claim false features. I’ll be waiting to get my hands on one of these bad boys as soon as they hit the market in late November with an estimated price of $1,700, at which time I’ll take some more conclusive sample photos that really show off the features of the new and improved 25mm f/2 Zeiss. 
