adanac
Veteran
- Location
- Vancouver, BC
I'm not a lens adapter (and I'm not saying it's a bad, I'm just too lazy), but a friend just sent me this link from today:
Fuji Xpro-1 and Leica 50mm Summilux | picabroad.com
Yup, those look just fine. Longer lenses shot wider open - you aren't going to be as sensitive to the problem and longer lenses are affected less in the first place.
Perhaps not here but whenever I've offered an opinion on whether the camera makes a good hose for M lenses I do try to throw in a good amount of "maybe" as how happy one is really depends on the nature of their photography.
A 50mm optic will be affected less than a 35 or 25 or 18 or 15 or 12mm optic -- the smearing effect gets progressively worse as focal lengths get shorter, and on a given lens, is progressively worse as the lens aperture is widened. I bet a lot of 50mm users could live with it, again depending somewhat on what they shoot.
Go wider, and probably you'll find fewer which are happy with the result. A 15 or 18mm lens isn't an ultrawide on APS-C crop cameras. At these wider physical focal lengths the smearing effect occupies the outer 1/4 to 1/3 of the frame along the horizontal axis. Add the outer left and outer right side of the affected frame together and you are talking about 1/2 to 2/3s of the frame being affected.
Except for those that always shoot a 50mm f/2 or faster lens wide open, all the time, many of the rest of us can probably think of images shot with wider angle lenses that would suffer some if 1/2 to 2/3 of the frame suffered from astigmatic smearing.
At some focal lengths and apertures you can see this smearing even at web resolution and sizes; in prints of any size the problem would be problematic. Wider angle lenses will highlight this problem more given they have inherently more depth off field.
Whether or not the camera will be a good platform for M lenses will depend entirely on the photographer. "Maybe, for you..." is probably the right way to look at it. Try before you buy might be a good approach or pick a vendor with liberal return policies if you need to do some experimenting with a collection of alternative glass - M lenses - on the camera before deciding it if works for you.