The new Zeiss is one of the very few lenses that exhibit almost no field-curvature at the shooting-distance for this test.

White-balance was adjusted to a neutral white and I did some exposure compensation to make the brightness match.

Noise-reduction is set to 0, sharpening to 70/0.5/36/10, with no extra tone, color, or saturation-adjustment. Processing was done in Lightroom 4.4 from RAW at camera standard settings. But differences in the AA-filter and micro-lens-design of a D800 and a D7000 might yield different end-results. The D800 results from the APS-C-corner should be a very good approximation for performance on a 16MP APS-C sensor (like the Nikon D7000), because the pixel-pitch of both sensors are the same. What follows are near-center results (first column) followed by APS-C-corner results and FF-corner results on a Nikon D800. Let’s see how this theoretical performance translates into real life results in the sharpness test based on Siemens-stars – and how the performance increases when you stop this lens down. But it looks like the Zeiss exhibits more astigmatism at very fine details than the Nikon. Even the 40 lp/mm curve of the Zeiss (showing the contrast at very fine details is better /higher than the 30 lp/mm curve from the Nikon. Other manufacturers like Nikon on the right display the contrast-curves at 10 and 30 lp/mm.įrom the charts the new Zeiss should perform on a higher level than the new Nikon 58/1.4G regarding overall contrast and sharpness (contrast with finer details) across the sensor. The MTF-chart of the Zeiss Otus displays the contrast-curve at 10, 20 and 40 lp/mm (from top to bottom), which is a bit unusual. I’ll show you the real-life performance at 4 mm (center), 13 mm (APS-C-corner), and 20 mm (FF-corner) on a D800. The x-axis displays the distance from the optical axis (=center of the sensor) in mm.

Higher values are better and the closer the dotted and the continuous lines of each color are together the less astigmatism (= resolution depends on the orientation of the test-pattern) the lens has. These charts show the lens-performance at the largest aperture f1.4.

Zeiss siemens star with turbulence