43 Rumors

17mm – wide, fast and with AF. We need something for indoors and night shooting. You can easily crop unwanted parts if you need narrower FOV.

Good thing Senko (the company that makes the lens that Noktor sticks a m4/3 mount on) already makes a 25mm f/0.95 that you can get for like $400. Hope Noktor doesn’t charge much more than the price of said lens + a C-mount adaptor.

But I bet the dude in his garage is happy that 25mm is winning your poll.

The question is… why?

I would love a 25mm or 30mm f/0.95. The Pany 20mm is just a bit wide for a “normal” lens. I know Senko has a 25mm f/0.95, but it’s not very sharp and the vignette really takes away from the image. I really hope Noktor makes a better version and for a price that is more affordable.

I suspect all their future lenses will continue to be manual focus — I don’t think it’s realistic to expect a small firm to engineer and produce an AF lens that will sell in small numbers.

So, if you knew that their next lens would be manual focus, would that change your preference? I think that because of the small image size, a 17/20/25 lens faster than f0.95 would be very difficult to focus manually, even with EVF magnification — flare from out-of-focus areas reduces the contrast so much that it’s hard to see exactly when you’ve reached the peak of best focus.

(It’s less of a problem with longer focal lengths because the image details are magnified more in the finder, but it’s still an issue. For example, I find it significantly harder to focus my 50mm f/1.1 Voigtlander Nokton than I do my 50mm f/1.5 Nokton, because the image as seen through the EVF is less crisp.)

I think the sweet spot for these independent ultraspeed lenses is going to continue to be in the 40-50mm range. Shorter lenses (if they actually cover M4/3, unlike the cheap CCTV lenses) will be hard to make and hard to focus, while longer ones will be too bulky.

Something along the lines of a 45mm f/0.85 with full M4/3 coverage, reasonably close focusing, and good central sharpness would be a nice thing for portraitists and cinematographers!

And why do we need expensive, ultra-fast primes? They have very limited use, and the quality isn’t up to par with other lenses. How about some inexpensive or moderately-priced primes that are pretty fast instead (f/1.2 – f/2)?

$250 for the Senko 50mm? I’m sure even Noktor would be happy to pay that price… where the hell do you find it that cheap? The 25mm is the cheapo one… it vignettes heavily though!

Oh and the poll is kinda stupid… it’s impractical to make a lens faster than f0.95 with a focal length anything other than 40-60mm (unless you want a boat anchor!!!)

AF yeahhh

JK: Not even remotely true. I have a 25mm f/0.78 (Canon TV-16) that is nice and compact, and would very likely cover m4/3 without significant vignetting.

Unfortunately, it extends too far past the c-mount to fit an unmodified E-P2 or G1 (the two m4/3 cameras I’ve tested). I still wonder about picking up a used and abused G1 and going to town with a dremel from time to time.