Two points to add: 1. This lens has two versions. Another version (slightly more expensive) has 14 aperture blades, which results in less dramatic, more professional looking sunstars. 2. This lens can be used on 44*33 medium format cameras when shift is under 8mm, because it has a huge 65mm image circle.
I own this lens and use it regularly on a 24.6mp camera. It is very soft and very prone to chromatic aberrations. This guy says its "excellent in the centre" - but you only have to look at the shot to see that it isn't. testing has shown that this lens will drop your image resolution by at least 50%. It is possible to bring the sharpness back using software (which is easier on a 45mp sensor like in the review) so it can be used (just) for professional architecture work. On the plus side, its fairly easy to use, and its very well constructed. It does an excellent job of cancelling rectilinear distortion, so you really do get wonderfully straight lines in your photos. Is it a fun lens? Definitely. Is it worth over a grand (which I paid for it): mmmmm maybe not. I would suggest waiting for the price to drop by a third. Then its definitely worth it.
@@kjltube Well it seems like, wherever I put the focus wheel, the shot is never particularly sharp. If it is decentered, I don't think there's anywhere in the UK that would be able to fix it. Its usable, and I suspect its just the nature of the lens losing a lot of res. If I upgrade to a d850 and still can't get results, I'll probably sell the lens.
The tilt function is actually really usefull, and you can do all sorts of weird stuff with it, like completely rotate the plane of focus by 60° or more to blur everything except a slit in the middle of the image being in focus to isolate a subject, or just slightly angle it for portraits, so that only the face is in focus and not the dress, to get that early 1900's style (normally done with photographic chambers).
I have this lens for Sony E-mount. I bought it the first day it was available. Admittedly, I haven't used it much, but I hope to be able to put it to more use in my real-estate photography. The rotate-shift photo-stitching will be great for those buildings which require hyper-wide angles.
I have a tilt adapter from a Ukrainian company called Arax that I use to pretty great effect with a few old Nikon shift lenses (28mm & 35mm). I bet it'd pair nicely with an SLR version of one on these on a mirrorless body!
I can only imagine how long that took to put through all of your tests! Great review as usual. I wasn't so interested in this before but maybe a consideration for the future.
Excellent as usual! I feel uncertain to tell you this but I hope it helps your channel: try mounting lens on a tripod or something similar at the beginning of the review, it will help our view. Hope this is not taken bad from you
Shift lenses have much larger image circle than the sensor size. When the lens is shifted the sensor doesn't capture the center of the image circle anymore but the less sharp area away from the center. However the loss of optical quality with lens shifting is much less than using digital perspective correction.
Very interesting lens. would love to see a compression between it. the f/4.5R version (red ring) and the 12mm f/2.8 with the Magic Shift Adapter (I know it comes out to be 17mm, not 15mm, but it does give you on the other hand the option to shoot at 12mm f/2.8 which the 15mm does not)
Thank you so much for this review, Christopher Frost. I'm just wondering what focal length I would need if I used another lens instead of this one, leveled it and cropped the bottom edge.
How is the compatibility with live view in apps or in an ipad? I use a lot this apps for my footage, I'm an architectural photographer, and I really need it to work with live view
I think, the tilt section has to be in front of the shift mechanism (as near as possible to the lens elements) as well as the shift section itself, to avoid distortion issues.
I dont get the point of these lenses with modern mirrorless mounts, when you could just make them all Leica-M and that would allow autofocus with adapters like the TechArt...
Shift lenses won't work on Techart or other similar autofocus adapter when shift is enabled. The reasons are too complexed to describe in a short comment, feel free to test out this phenomenon yourself.
So you loose quality when you do it with software and you loose quality when you shift the lens. What's the point? Am I missing a benefit to a shift lens?
It depends how much you need to correct. If you only need to make a small perspective correction then you might as well do it in software. If you need to make a huge correction then you always get better results doing it with a shift lens. And if you're using them for panoramas then the shift lens always gives more seamless results. Yes, either way you do lose technical quality compared to irrelevant flat photos of a test chart, but in actual professional use getting the perspective right is far more important than pixel-peeping a drop in contrast. If your choice is to get the shot right with a shift lens with a bit of purple fringing or not get the shot at all, you live with the shift lens.
@@sebastianmatthews1663 honestly I'd rather get the pixelation of the software stretch rather than the blur and aberrations but I've never used such a lens so I can't speak confidently
@@musicdefinesgravity Yeah, with sofware magic you'll get much worse results, with streching and compressing one half looks oversharpened, and you always lose like third of your image becuase it has no longer have parallel sides, you have to crop in severely, and good luck trying to get back your field of view trying to stich multiple software corrected abominations.
Wait, they already produce a 15mm f4 shift macro lens, don't they? So what is the purpose of this one? At almost double the price as well! Am I missing something?
The other one has a shift function as a kind of 'afterthought' feature, just for fun. Shifting the macro lens would cause big problems with image quality.
@@christopherfrost Right, I was rewatching your review of the other one and, yeah, this one has practically no distortion! Also the older one shifts only up and down?
@@loukashareangas4420 Yes, and the shift function is only viable for APS-C sensors on the older f4 model. However, the lens is really great for close-up work if you are looking for different perspectives.
I'd say it depends. When you do it in post, you'll lose pixels from stretching and squeezing the image, and cutting out parts of your frame, all depending on how much you need to correct. If you're doing only small corrections, you'd probably get better results with a regular lens, even better if it's sharper than this one.
RF TS-E 14mm f/4L and 24mm f/3.5L are coming, though obviously are not a high priority development like the super-Teles are so it might be a while, and are rumoured to be the first tilt-shift lenses in the world with autofocus. (Though I don't really see how autofocus would ever be useful with a T-S.) TS-Es longer than that likely will take much longer to be made specifically for RF since the shorter flange distance doesn't actually help tilt-shift design at all, so there's unlikely to be much they could do to improve on the existing EF TS-E 90mm and 135mm.
Thanks for the review. Anyone here tried to make 360 panorama with this lens? (using nodal panoramic head) I tried taking 360, 6 side photos at 60 degrees separation, great stitching, but when including the ceiling, with 1 photo or with 3 photos by using the shift mechanism, I could not manage to stitch a full panorama. if the ceiling issue is solved then the floor will be as well. Thanks.
Would you please next times speak a bit slower and clear so that foreigners whose first language isn't english may understand everything you say? Thank you so much!
