I have a real soft spot in my heart for Zeiss lenses. It all started when I went from a Minolta 650si with CRAP Sigma kit zooms to a used Hasselblad 500cm with the 80mm Zeiss kit lens.

The difference in image quality was astonishing- I’d finally tasted (arguably) the best image quality cameras had to offer and I wasn’t going back.

The difference in image quality between Nikon’s pro lenses and the ZF (manual focus) lenses is not anywhere near as large as I’d seen years ago but I still love the lenses.

The focusing is wonderfully damped, they feel great, they look fantastic and they take great shots. The only thing I can knock them for is their price- the 50mm will set you back ~$5-600, and when they initially came out (when I bought my first), it was $800 wired to Germany to get the 50mm.

I’ve got a 50mm and a 35mm and Zeiss has now come out with the 18mm wide-angle. It’s got a HUGE 82mm filter size to make sure that you don’t chop off part of the image.

Nikkors are tools, Zess lenses are mechanical objet d’art- at least for me.

Click here to read D3Guy’s review of the lens with sample shots.

Zeiss 18mm WA on Nikon D3

Tags: lenses, zeiss

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 18th, 2008 at 11:46 and is filed under Regular Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.