QUICK LOOK : Zeiss 85/1.4

Thanks to Henry's Newmarket who brought in a Zeiss 85 for me to look at to close out my challenge to pick an 85mm. To say it's beautiful is an understatement. The quality feel is unsurpassed. Having a lens with a hyper focal distance scale on it is a real treat. Sharp? You could cut yourself. Sadly, it's greatest benefit, a really flat helicoid for precision focusing makes focusing very slow. The focusing screens in my Canons are not much help for precision focus and the in focus indicator that leverages Canon's focus detector does not match well with the travel of the focus ring. If I were using a traditional manual camera this lens would be the one, but I'm not so it isn't.

Aperture settings work from the camera as expected. Fine focus is tough and whenever I tried trusting the in focus indicator where it looked ok in the viewfinder, it was not sharp when viewed in playback. I did all my testing at f/1.4 since that's why you spend the coin on a fast lens. I tried Live View as a means to focusing but it's so foreign to me that without a loupe it was unusable.

Consequently, the Zeiss is not an option, and the softness in the Sigma irks me, so I will be saving my now discontinued pennies for the Canon 85/1.2L II