43 Rumors

I bought one of these when I missed out on the Noktor. It’s a big, solid, heavy lens, I was surprised how heavy. I’m using it on my GF1 with an adapter. I’m enjoying using it and I’m getting some nice results from it…
http://www.flickr.com/photos/acute-distress/tags/nokton/
It’s very soft at 1.1 but sharpens up at 1.4. All of my shots on Flickr are 1.4 or smaller.

The Voigtlander is an excellent lens. I use mine a lot on both my Epson R-D 1 and my Lumix G1.

One important difference vs. other ultra-speed lenses is that its imaging “signature” is much more conventional than most — its full-aperture images don’t have the “hazy” look that I see in the Noktor samples or from photos with older ultra-speed designs such as the Canon 50/0.95 (which I own) or the Angenieux (based on samples I’ve seen online.) This means it may NOT be so good if you’re looking for dreamy, atmospheric images… but IS good for low-light documentary shooting etc.

Minor drawbacks:

– At full aperture, it’s slightly more difficult to focus accurately on a Micro Four Thirds camera than a slower lens would be… the edges aren’t quite as contrasty as with, say, the 50/1.5 Nokton, so it doesn’t snap into focus quite as crisply. You’ll need to use the manual-focus assist feature a bit more often than you would with the 50/1.5 Nokton or similar slower lens.

– I’ve noticed that bright highlights in the background of images shot at f/1.1 can take on a somewhat hard-edged, ring-shaped appearance, rather than being smooth blurs. Objects in front of the main subject, on the other hand, blur out very smoothly. For optical reasons you can only have smooth blurring (“bokeh”) either in front of the focus plane OR behind it, but not both… smooth background blur is better for portraits, but smooth foreground blur is good for documentary shooting where you want objects between the subject and the camera to be unobtrusive. So, I suspect the Nokton was designed deliberately for “documentary blur” rather than “portrait blur.”

Comparison article on my blog: http://ranger9.net/?p=425

Gallery with lots of photos made with this lens on the Lumix G1, mostly at full aperture:
http://ranger9.net/?page_id=278&album=8

(The gallery also includes some shots made with a 12.5/1.9 Cosmicar, but those will be easy to spot because of the heavily vignetted corners! I think I shot all the others with the Nokton.)