The American romance with overkill. What lens is that?
Taking a break from the Leica-mania for a day or so. I reached into a drawer at random and pulled out an odd lens. It's the Carl Zeiss, Milvus 50mm f1.4 in a Nikon F mount. I attached it to a Panasonic S5. The lens is twice the weight of the camera body. And, in real world terms, it's just a 50mm lens. The kind we used to buy all the time back in the film days as our first lens, or our primary lens, or our favorite lens.
Back then they were small and relatively light. And affordable. They tucked in nice and close to the front of the camera. But then, in the middle of the digital age, all of a sudden 50mm f1.4 lenses grew into enormous packages. Dwarfing the cameras they were intended to be used on and pushing the camera strap/camera connections to their breaking points.
What the hell happened?
I think we can place the blame solely on Sigma. Somewhere in the second decade of the digital age Sigma introduced the 50mm f1.4 "Art" lens and then.....all hell broke loose. What was that all about? Well, I think Sigma realized the three legged stool conundrum of high performance lens design applied to normal lenses. For decades lens makers compromised a bit to hit a certain package size. And price point. The traditional lens designers realized that the prevailing tradition of film shooters was to depend on fast apertures for ease of focusing (film days!) but never really intended to shoot with the lenses at the widest aperture. The makers were able to get away with allowing a bit of vignetting and a bit of edge unsharpness at wide open apertures in return for holding the line on overall size and weight. And cost. Once stopped down to the "normal" taking apertures all of the lenses sharpened up pretty well, across their frames, and the vignetting more or less disappeared.
So, how does a third party lens maker compete with a big camera brand lens maker's existing 50mm lenses? Maybe on price but it seems market research at the time indicated that most consumers of interchangeable lens cameras were willing to pay a bit more to get the more impressive brand name lens instead of a similar lens from a third party vendor with a checkered past. And a reputation for reliability issues.
When Sigma chose to reinvent itself in the market the 50mm lens is where they started. They pulled out all the design stops and aimed for the highest overall image quality, compromising instead on size and weight. They allowed the overall package of a 50mm lens to double in size and triple (or more) in weight. They made it big and heavy to carry around. And they raised the price of the finished product so it was far beyond the 50mm lenses that resembled the previous lenses we bought and used all the way back to the film days.
But no mistake, the 50mm f1.4 Art lens from Sigma broke through a quality barrier. They set the new bar for optical performance across the board. And the same cultural ethos that still compels some car buyers to demand V-8 engines and hood scoops came into play with lenses. Here was a hot rod, tuned, performance driven option that could out perform the other contenders. Sharper, fewer artifacts, lower distortion, better corners. One of these in the ole camera bag meant you were able to deliver the best on sensor performance your camera was capable of.
Of course I rushed out and bought one for my Nikon DSLR of the moment. But in retrospect I was a lot dumber than several of my more sensible photographer friends who looked at the Sigma Art lens, sniffed a bit and opted instead to stay with smaller options. When mirrorless cameras became the overwhelming choice the same photographers opted instead to adapt smaller, more facile lenses from rangefinder catalogs. Understanding that a very well corrected 50mm f2.0, designed to be small enough to be comfortably used on a rangefinder camera, would be easier (by far) to carry, to operate and...even...to afford. They routinely asked me how often I ever shot with the big Sigma lens at its f1.4 aperture and I had to truthfully answer that I could count the times on my fingers.
At the same time all of the other manufacturers realized that they needed to achieve performance parity with Sigma's Art series lenses and so the "space race" was on to make the most optically perfect lens possible in many of the most popular focal lengths. Damn the size and weight! Full speed ahead. Grabbing for higher profit margins in the process.
Why were these huge lenses so popular? Why are giant Ford, Chevrolet and Dodge pick-up trucks bestsellers in America? It's all about overkill. Bigger motors, bigger wheels, bigger front grills and the potential to carry bigger payloads. The last of which almost never, ever happens. It's certainly not carpenters, lawn care workers, or bricklayers who are splashing out nearly $100,000 for King Ranch, limited edition, Premium pick up trucks with incredible interior appointments and cabs that can seat six comfortably. Nope, it's the suburban moms and dads who want to be surrounded by sheet metal. But not just regular sheet metal. Nope, they want luxury sheet metal.
Side story: Detour: I have a friend who loves big trucks. He works in an office in downtown five or six days a week. He lives in an affluent suburb with no geological obstacles that might require a big truck to overcome. He commutes about five miles to and from work each day and maybe goes out for meetings or meals around the genteel urban landscape. Most of his driving is in 35 mph speed limit areas. He rushed out and bought a pick-up truck called a "Raptor." I think it's a Ford product. It's big and has a surly big motor. On some open road I have no doubt it can go very fast. It was extremely expensive (by my standards...) and gets horrible gas mileage. None of this bothers my friend and he can afford it all.
The first business day after taking delivery of his truck he headed downtown to work. He wasn't really paying attention as he pulled into the parking garage adjacent to the high rise where his office is located. Sadly, the truck was several inches taller than part of the parking garage's concrete ceiling. He darn near scraped the roof of his new truck off. A sobering moment. An unintended consequence. An unforeseen result of the romance for pick-up truck overkill. His "thrill of ownership" was diminished.
For a while a large contingent of experienced photographers snapped up the big lenses based on the promise of top performance. The mantra (laughable) was that clients would never let us compromise and that we must "keep up" with equipment progress if we are to remain relevant in our markets. Shoulder damage, lens mount damage and comfort be damned. And I'm certain that many, many good photographs were created with the ever bigger lenses. But perhaps no more than might have been created with more sensible lenses....
The king of overkill though, following in Sigma's newly trodden path, were the Zeiss Otus 55mm f1.4 and the 85mm f1.4 lenses. Widely reviewed at their introductions as the sharpest, highest resolution, contrastiest, least hobbled lenses of all time (at least for consumers...). They were frightfully expensive and even more frighteningly almost unmanageable for the handholding of camera and lens. I don't have the exact weight of the 55mm Otus in front of me but it was dense and almost immovable. Did I also mention expensive? The "normal" 50mm f1.4 lens (in this case a 55mm) was now cresting the $4,000 mark. Setting the new bar high.
I'm not sure how many of these lenses actually sold. But the bar was set, the new price standards were set and all of a sudden you could buy a 50mm f1.4 lens that made the contemporaneous Leica 50mm f1.4 Summilux lens for the M system look.....cheap. Or at least cheaper. Even considering the price of a lens adapter.
The Otus lenses were designed to be amazing. But they were designed somewhere around 2005 and their one flaw (besides price and size) was that it wasn't quite required at that time for premium lenses to be water and dust resistant. And in short order the optical sciences advanced which allowed competitors to make similar quality lenses but at a reduced size and, more importantly, at reduced prices.
A few years later Carl Zeiss came roaring back with a new line of lenses they called "Milvus" lenses. I have no idea why the names Otus and then Milvus and I'm not really interested to know. Perhaps a blogger more obsessed with just the right word, just the right explanation will jump in and explain. The Milvus lenses were the re-do of the Otus lenses and those in the know claim that the newer designs, in many cases, deliver slightly higher optical performance coupled with almost affordable pricing.
I never took the bait until one of my more affluent and mercurial photographer friends offered me a trade for something and the trade involved me getting a Milvus 50mm f1.4 lens for, basically, a song. I loved the idea of it but truth be told the lens rarely makes it past the studio door because it's big and heavy and when stopped down to f5.6 it's not discernibly better than any number of other 50mm lenses I have in the studio that are half the size and weight.
But when I do take it out and use it I am constantly impressed at the images it generates if I use it at its widest aperture and also at f2.0 and f2.8. I had been using it on one of the Leica SLs but today, in an effort to save on weight, I put it on the much lighter and smaller Panasonic S5 camera body. It is easier to handle. The combo does a good job with image stabilization. The manual focusing is quick and easy. The image magnification works like a charm.
But in the end I still can't get over just how ungainly and obtrusive both its size and weight make it.
Rev up your engines. The Milvus line is the turbo-charged V8 of lenses: just because you can.
Not recommended for daily use. Highly recommended for very specific shots where you want super sharp focus in one thin plane surrounded by no focus everywhere else. In that case get as close as you can and shot one of these wide open.
Or just buy the lightweight, cheap, high quality Panasonic 50mm f1.8 lens. You'll probably be equally happy with the real world results and you might even have some energy left over at the end of a long shooting day.
Enjoy the weekend. I know I will.
(time spent researching, writing and photographing for this post: one hour, thirty minutes. Just keeping track for grins...).
