TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 review
The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 is a specialist lens. I don’t see it as an everyday 50mm prime lens to shoot every kind of subject, although it’s reasonably capable of doing so. I say reasonably because of some optical issues we’ll talk about later. But it’s fast. So fast! I gobbles light up and minces detail into bokeh everywhere but in the paper thin depth of field. And that is the reason why most people will be looking at this lens. That and the fact that most of us can’t afford the Leica lens this 50mm draws inspiration from: the Leica Noctilux 50mm 0.95 ASPH. A new Noctilux, here in UK, will set you back £9200 or more. The TTArtisan? £700 at the moment of writing, when bought from Europe with import duties paid. That is 13 times less. Yep, I said 13 times. Blimey.
TTArtisan? Who are they?
TTArtisan is a Chinese lens manufacturer owned by Shenzhen Mingjiang Optical Technology Co. Ltd. It specialises in mirrorless lenses and it seems to be outsourcing the actual manufacturing of the lens to DJ-Optical, a Chinese company that also manufactures lenses for the very similarly named lens brand 7Artisans, also from China. 7Artisans has appeared on the market in 2017 with a fast 50mm 1.1 lens that made a bit of a splash in the rangefinder and mirrorless photographic community with its incredibly low price and surprising performance. TTArtisan released its first lens in 2019, an M-mount 35mm 1.4. Apparently the two brands are not related at all, only sharing the outsourcing of production to DJ-Optical. I wonder why TTArtisan decided to use a brand name that matched so closely the already existing 7Artisans. This naming similarity led to a lot of confusion among us users about the relationship between the two manufacturers: a common opinion circulating on the web was that TTArtisan was the brand for higher quality releases as opposed to 7Artisans. I don’t think the guys at 7Artisans really liked that.
I will try and review lenses from both brands in the future, and the one I’m eagerly awaiting for is the rumored (some product pictures have been already circulated) TTArtisan 50mm 1.4.
How are the build quality and the handling then?
Well, pretty good I have to say. The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 is big and heavy, and its barrel design is awfully reminiscent of the Leica Noctilux. Difficult to tell them apart from a distance. True, the lens mount has a golden colour on my copy, but I’m not a fan of that: no need to be cute. I never had a Noctilux in hand, so I will base my judgement only on this lens. The appearance is that of a well put together, high quality item. Tolerances are pretty tight, no wobbles, mounting with a satisfying click on my Leica M240 and it’s a really solid combination when mounted.
The focus ring has a fairly short throw of just over 90 degrees and it moves easily with a good dampening. It doesn’t feel buttery smooth though, but this can happen even with Leica lenses when brand new and it should get smoother with use. At least I hope so: it is still feeling the same after more than two thousands shots …
The aperture ring is well damped and clicks fairly precisely although not as positively as my Zeiss ZM lenses. The spacing between the F-stops is uneven, getting narrower towards the highest value of F16. This spacing hasn’t given me any issues whatsoever, but I know that some people might be bothered by this. I have no idea why, it simply works as advertised and counting the clicks when keeping the camera at eye level works seamlessly. The aperture mechanism has 14 straight blades which keep an almost circular shape throughout the aperture range.
The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 is big. It is not a lens you would like to carry everyday as a standard 50mm prime lens on a Leica M. It certainly won’t feel or look so big to DSLR or mirrorless users, because the lens size for a modern 50mm 1.4 prime lens has become ludicrous across systems. Have a look below, I have compared the TTArtisan to another two 50mm lenses I happen to have at hand, the Zeiss Planar T* 50mm F2 ZM and a collapsible 1952 Leitz Elmar 5cm 3.5 Red Scale (review coming soon for both lenses). It’s actually quite funny how different the options can be!
One thing I really don’t like is the viewfinder blockage of this oil drum sized lens: I often really minded it when shooting, I just had to guess the precise framing for some pictures:
Look at that size, it almost reaches the focusing patch when focusing close! And that is before you even mount a hood. Nope, I don’t like the size. On the other hand, if you just obliterate anything but the subject in the picture, does it really matter that much? It depends on usage. I also use this lens stopped down (blasphemy, I know!) and it really bothers me then.
The box and presentation are an area where TTArtisan made mixed efforts, as showed in my previous blog post.
Focusing: how hard is it?
Bloody hard. I made a point of shooting the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 focusing only with the rangefinder in everyday usage. The EVF on the Leica M240 is more than good enough for framing and focusing (it amuses me how nowadays so many people claim that they need a better, larger viewfinder all the time and every new iteration of EVFs is absolutely and desperately needed to be able to frame their picture...I wonder how did Henri Cartier-Bresson and his contemporaries manage at all to frame anything with the viewfinder of their Leica III models in their early career?) but in use it is clunky at best. You shoot one frame, have a blackout that lasts a few weeks (or so it feels) and wait for the camera to get ready for the next shot, while you might as well take a swig of coffee. At this point your next shot is long gone. You might have surmised I hate using the EVF on my Leica M240. But does focus peaking work? It does but wide open it is still difficult to discern the exact focus plane: spherical aberration galore and a lower contrast make it a bit slow and fiddly. Add to that a horribly long shutter lag with the Leica M live view (which the EVF is using) and you and your subject will have moved significantly by the time the shot is taken. I so prefer the rangefinder focusing… Having said that I use mostly the longitudinal chromatic aberration to fine tune the focus point: it is so pronounced that if I get a magenta outline around my focus point I know I’ve taken it too close, if the outline is green we are past the subject! When there is almost no outline we’re there.
Close focus is 0.7m, closer than its Leica Noctilux 50mm 0.95 competitor, but in my opinion that is only for bragging rights. There are two main issues with close focus:
it back focuses by around 2cm - yes, 2cm, not 2mm! The wide open depth of field at 1m for a 50mm 0.95 lens is 2cm but the optical aberrations make it just millimetres in the image. You can imagine how easy it is to nail focus with the rangefinder that close: nigh impossible. Out comes the EVF again. Or not: what’s the point of shooting wide open at such a close distance, especially a portrait?
spherical aberration galore. Seriously, that close focus could have been useful for a close portrait, but you end up with the ears in focus instead of the eyes and a lot of fuzziness around those few details that are in focus. On the other hand this is very dependent on the subject.
The portrait above is a good example: a shot across the table in a cafe. My lovely wife Daniela was patient enough for me to take quite a few shots to nail focus, while I focused with the rangefinder and shot away while slowly rocking backwards. It took me 6 or 7 frames to get one in perfect focus. On the other hand when the subject is over 1.5 meters away the precision is there, it is just up to the user to get it right:
To be honest the close focus can yield ok image quality at times. Just avoid anything that resembles a specular highlight in the focus plane and you’re good, like in this picture. To get the blackberries in focus I focused on the little finger and hoped for the best.
A great feature of the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 and its siblings is that it can be calibrated for rangefinder focusing directly by the user. This feature appeared on the market with the M-mount 7Artisans lenses, and it is useful indeed given the small differences that are common in the rangefinder calibration of different cameras. But the process can have some foibles: stay tuned for a blog post about the calibration for this lens!
Image quality? If you managed to get anything in focus, that is!
The image quality of the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 is often pretty good. There are problems though, as you can expect from such an extreme design and affordable price.
The optical design is made of 11 elements in 8 groups, with 1 double sided aspherical element, 2 ultra low dispersion lenses and 8 high refractive index elements. Here are the design and the MTF curve for the geeks out there.
These images were taken from the official TTArtisan website on the product page: you can find them here: https://www.ttartisan.com/m50mm095. The design specifications look impressive! I never look at MTF curves myself, I just look at the images. But from this chart there seems to be a healthy degree of astigmatism and possibly lateral chromatic aberration (LaCA) especially at F5.6 at both higher and lower frequencies with a slightly wavy field wavy curvature between 10 and 15mm from axis. Apart for low frequencies at F5.6 the sagittal and meridional curves don’t seem to want to stay together throughout the frame as soon as you leave the image axis. What will this mean for the actual real world image quality though? Read on to find out!
Let’s have a look at some test pictures: nothing of value, just trying to get an idea of the rendering. Of course, the first time you have a lens that fast you can’t find the aperture ring to save your life, you never close that diaphragm down! It does get boring pretty quickly though…more on that later.
Some examples wide open again, happily obliterating anything apart from a random item chosen as subject:
Please note that these random images are unedited and uncropped, just test shots to assess how the background blur renders and how sharp the subject can be. No attention was given to framing or any photographic compositional rule. All shots were focused with the rangefinder, single attempts: you can nail focus with practice.
We can see that the subject sharpness can be quite good, especially mid-frame, and the subject separation can be dramatic. The background can really melt away, but there are instances when it can get quite busy:
Apart from the awful framing we can see that in the first picture the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 renders a very sharp and detailed subject with great contrast. The background is very smooth. In the second the background is much busier and less pleasant, although the focus plane is still nice and sharp. The distance from subject and background does make a big difference, like in this extremely exciting picture of a sign…I will soon win some prize for this, don’t you think?
I find the background rendition quite unpleasant here. On the other hand there was no reason to shoot wide open here other than a childish enthusiasm for my new toy! There are much better ways than just blasting the background to smithereens to draw the eyes to a subject. But why do we get a 0.95 lens if not for wide open shots? We will look at more bokeh and in more detail later.
Let’s get a closer look a those garden shots, just to get an idea of the plane of focus and how it renders. These are 100% crops:
I honestly think this is impressive. The second picture highlights one of the gripes I have with this lens though: with high contrast subjects, apart from the expected purple or green fringing, there is often a red fringing. It’s interesting to see that there is only red fringing here all around each petal.
Talking about fringing, there is an inordinate amount of longitudinal chromatic aberration (LoCA) for a 50mm prime lens. This will show as magenta fringing around the out of focus highlights before the focus plane, green fringing after the focus plane. This is incredibly visible in the focus shift and sharpness test shots below. The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 also shows heaps of lateral chromatic aberration (LaCA) in the form of green fringing on the left and magenta on the right of high contrast edges, visible even stopped down. To me this is so visible that it thoroughly degrades the image in some cases. See here, in another awards winning random shot:
Now this might seem like nitpicking, but as soon as this picture appeared on full screen I saw it immediately. I knew what it was because I had a lens doing it all the time in the past, the Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 17mm F2.8 on the Micro Four Thirds system. You need to look at the main image on full screen. Then the details will show you what it is: every detail with high contrast, including all the grass highlights, show the fringing, green on the right and magenta on the left. It’s clearly visible in the extreme detail sample. Another example:
Even if in this image it’s less visible it still grates on my eyes: the image looks extremely digital in a negative way. On the positive side, this is a problem only if you can see it and it happens in specific instances. particularly, it won’t be a problem if you shoot wide open all the time! But let’s have a look at a series of boring three branch shots against bright light just to torture the lens and have a look at that LaCA properly:
To be honest it may appear ludicrous to shoot a shot like this wide open or close to it, but it has relevance with a super-fast 50mm prime because a portrait subject will often have hair against a bright background and the tree branches simulate that closely enough. Obviously at 0.95 we have an optical aberrations festival, as would be expected, but I have to say I had expected a much worse performance here. The purple fringing never goes away, and by F4 the splitting of the green and purple around high contrast edges is clearly visible, especially with the smaller branches. I never expected this to be an apochromatic lens, but the LaCA not well corrected at all in my opinion, especially for a 50mm prime lens. Of course this is an extreme design at a low price and some compromises will have to be made. How much this compromise is going to be a problem is up to the user. It is an issue for me.
Can we have a better look at that bokeh?
This is a fundamental factor in choosing this lens: is it luscious or is it rough? I would say it’s a bit of both. As we have seen above, in some pictures the background can get quite busy, like in this shot:
I’m not a fan of that bokeh! Let’s see another one:
I see quite a pattern here: when the subject is a bit further away the bokeh is not buttery at all, it’s almost crunchy! All the highlights have rimmed edges and become very prominent. If in colour, the highlight edge will be often green thanks to our dear LoCA. But if the subject is closer things change:
That is some wonderful bokeh! The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 can really deliver in the right situation. It’s unfortunate that the difference can be so striking at different distances!
Another characteristic of the bokeh highlights I don’t particularly like is the onion ring effect. And in my sample there is what I think is a grinding issue on a lens element:
These onion rings are not great but certainly not uncommon! They are normally seen in aspherical lenses because of the grinding process involved in shaping the aspherical surface. The polishing of the lens surface will not be enough to make the grinding groove mark disappear, unless you use hand polishing by specifically trained technicians like Panasonic has done. The aspherical lens that surprised me by the absence of such onion ring bokeh is the Voigtlander Nokton 50mm 1.2 VM Aspherical. Its bokeh is spectacular. But here the streaks across the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 balls are not normal. The bokeh balls, that is! That must be a flaw on an optical element. I never saw anything similar on images from other samples of the same lens. I will certainly return this sample for a new one.
Let’s have a look at another set of images at different distances between camera, subject and background:
Again, these are unedited and uncropped. And Daniela wasn’t thrilled with the portraits, but she let me use them anyway: thank you! The further away the subject the worse the bokeh gets. It’s changing character with distance, and not in a great way. Notice two main things though: surprisingly good performance with regards to purple fringing here (look around Daniela’s hair), and a rather prominent magenta colour shift on the right side. That is surprising for a 50mm prime lens, but it has been reported elsewhere already. We will take a better look at that later.
Sharpness and focus shift
Here is a series of shots at different apertures to show how sharpness and bokeh of the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 change when closing down the diaphragm:
There might be a slight variation in focus point on that sawed-off branch stump: this is all hand held and rangefinder focused. As you can see, even wide open the centre sharpness is very good! The bokeh is almost indistinguishable between F0.95 and F1.1 (the next marked aperture on the ring). At F1.4 the difference is easily detected.
Let’s now have a look at the focusing charts for sharpness and focus shift. Here is the test shot (wide open of course!):
I added a figurine to see the mid-frame performance. Notice how we are seeing the magenta colour shift again on the right side. Now the 100% crops for some glorious pixel peeping!
Getting that focus right in the first shot wide open was honestly very, very hard. The mix of spherical aberration and LoCA create a very low contrast edge and the colour fringing confuses the exact focus point. Actually, the point of focus is sharper when a bit of green creeps in, which I don’t understand optically but seems to give a sharper image indeed. In real life shooting, if I had to focus in live view, I would use the colour fringing to check focus, as already mentioned: green? I’m past it. Purple? Too close! No fringing? Got it! Overall though wide open there is a lot of spherical aberration hazing the image and creating glow, but the actual resolution is not bad at all. The centre sharpness in real life shots is really impressive! At mid frame the resolution is similar but the LaCA is starting to creep in, although it doesn’t get much worse towards the corner, where the field curvature brings the point of focus slightly closer. Here the detail is smeared more by astigmatism than anything else. The extreme corners are not shown well because they just lose it completely: the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 just doesn’t do far corners. It just minces them, no matter the aperture.
At F1.4 the centre is getting good, mid-frame slightly less impressive, corner not impressive. By F2 the image quality is really coming together, and it improves even more after that. The corners are getting good at F4, although they are still plagued by LaCA, and the far corners just don’t ever get anywhere near decent.
Focus shift? Pretty impressive performance I would say! It’s there at its worst at F2.8 but the target still falls within the depth of field, F4 isn’t a problem anymore, F8 is great. Well done, it’s an incredible performance given the lens speed and the extreme design! I was looking forward to commenting a lot more about the optical property that gives the name to my blog, but there isn’t much to say. Just yeah!
What about the field curvature shape?
It bows towards the camera at the edges and doesn’t show that much waviness here, but this is just a horizontal field across the image, not diagonal. I haven’t found any issues with focusing and recomposing, which I normally do for most of my images. The focusing errors were mainly due to user error - unless the subject was closer than 1.5 meters: the close focus shift, remember?
Vignetting, distortion and that magenta colour shift
Distortion is quite complex on this lens, as you can see in this image on the upper edge: pincushion with a moustache pattern. Not an easy one to fully correct. Even with a correction of -6 in Lightroom we still see some residual distortion, like in the image below:
It almost looks like at -6 I get a bit of barrel distortion, but if you look at the corners the pincushion is still there: which way to go? I mean, look at those corners: those lines bend quite dramatically. I have never been bothered much by distortion in my lenses, but I can definitely detect this one and I feel the need to correct it at times. We will probably have to hope in a dedicated profile to get anything good though. This is unexpected from a 50mm prime lens, normally the distortion should be a bit simpler, but we have to remember that this is an extreme design.
Vignetting is heavy as expected and improves stopping down, obviously. But it never goes fully away from the corners:
I’m surprised at the corners, it almost looks like the lens struggles to cover the full image circle. This would also explain why the far corners never sharpen up. You might have noticed again the magenta colour shift on the right: it’s time to have a closer look at it. The following pictures are shot wide open with no in camera lens profile on the left, and on the right I used the 11809 Elmarit 28mm 2.8 lens profile, which I found to be a good one to eliminate the colour shift in real life. Before anyone cries murder the white balance is set at exactly the same value for both images: 4300K and 0 tint.
I find it very interesting to notice how the colour shift is prevalent on the right, present on the left lower corner, almost absent from the upper left corner! Having spoken to TTArtisan they said that the colour shift can happen differently on different bodies like Leica M9 or M240 and according to where the light source is. If you shoot away from the light the shift doesn’t happen apparently, but I beg to differ: these sample shots are lit by a window behind and on the right of the camera, against a white wall. No lens should have issues with such setting!
About the white balance: isn’t it interesting how much the colour dominance in the picture changes with the 11809 lens profile activated? The centre of the uncorrected image seems pretty neutral to me, but the 11809 profile image has a yellow colour cast, with a slight greenish tinge on both far sides. This is even more visible with the vibrance cranked up.
Flare resistance and ghosting
To be honest I am thoroughly impressed in the performance of the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 for flare resistance. The shot above is wide open, straight out of camera. Apart from being a ghastly image, it really shows how this lens handles direct light incredibly well given the number of lens elements and the speed. Below is a series of ugly shots of the same leaves but shifting the sun, which is in the image, gradually towards the corner of the frame:
As you can see artefacts are visible only in the first (small green blob and big pinkish half blob) and second (green blob) image, with veiling glare that tends to disappear taking the sun away from the centre of the frame. The subject is always showing good contrast and sharpness. The last image has the sun out of frame and shows veiling glare and a small green blob, but most interesting for me is the veiling glare cut-off on the upper right side of the image. Is that glare cut-off by the baffle inside the camera mount? I have never seen that before.
The two images above were shot at F5.6, looking for sunstars for the review. As shot on the left, I hit auto edit on Lightroom for the image on the right. Notice the glare that was invisible before!
Let’s have a look at the same thing wide open:
It did a lot better wide open!
Obviously if you really want to torture the lens you will get a lot of bad flare and artefacts on any lens. F8 here:
I produced these shots with a LED torch pointed at the lens. Please ignore the white balance: although the same on all images it was really difficult to get it to look natural, so I gave up…joys of mixed light images. By the way, the background was actually purple: I got that one right! What this test tells me is that you can’t cheat physics, but in real world shooting the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 rocks in the flare resistance department when wide open.
Coma levels of this lens wide open are quite acceptable for me:
Considering the speed of this lens and the extreme design I am positively surprised: my Zeiss Biogon T* 35mm F2 ZM is way, way worse than this and is a more expensive and much less extreme design. Or have a look at my Voigtlander Nokton Classic 35mm 1.4 II VM review to see what bad coma is. I haven’t found a fast 50mm prime lens without some level of coma wide open, and this is a good performance in my opinion. I really had to go look for this aberration in my night shooting, I just couldn’t reproduce much of it unless I found those fairy lights.
The TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 can also produce beautiful sunstars: I believe this rather messy frame was shot at F8.
Conclusions?
I will be honest: I won’t be keeping this lens. There are multiple reasons why the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 is not a good fit for my collection, and this has to do with its many cons against the pros:
CONS
Spherical aberration wide open
Really prominent LoCA
LaCA can really ruin the images (for me)
Astigmatism off axis
Far corners never get acceptably sharp
Close focus shift
Magenta colour shift
Vignetting never disappears
Complex and fairly heavy distortion
Bokeh can get wiry and nervous
User has to tune focus calibration
Big and heavy for an M-mount camera
Viewfinder obstruction
PROS
0.95. Wohoo!
Pretty good quality build
Good haptics
Great price
Quite sharp in the centre even at 0.95
Incredible flare resistance wide open
Minimal focus shift
Reasonable coma wide open
Bokeh can be luscious
User can tune focus calibration
I haven’t included the onion ring bokeh in the cons because almost every aspherical lens has it and it wouldn’t be fair putting it as a con. The heavy vignetting wide open is to be expected from such an extreme design, although is should clear up closing down. The streak across the balls - the bokeh balls! - is a sample variation, so it’s a con but it’s only this specific sample.
As you can see the list of cons is pretty long, and for me there are too many of them in the image quality department to consider using this lens for my shooting. The images can be stunning at times, but this happens only with the right circumstances. Let’s list what the conditions to get a really good looking image are:
Subject between 1 and 2 meters from camera
Many shots to work around the close focus shift with a subject closer than 1.5 meters
Maybe EVF
Wide open or close to it
Avoid high contrast high frequency textures (like grass under sun) if stopped down
Frame corners not important even when stopped down
Try to avoid highlights on subject if wide open to avoid excessive glow
No straight lines close to edges
Code the lens to avoid colour shift (not possible on non Leica M/SL bodies)
This list is quite long. Way too long.
In summary: a one trick pony
You buy such a fast lens to shoot it wide open. At all distances, with any subject. With the TTArtisan 50mm 0.95 I find myself having to select very specific circumstances and subjects to enjoy the images this lens delivers, and this just isn’t good enough for me. If I am out shooting I need to be able to trust the lens at any aperture, because shooting everything wide open gets old very quickly. It isn’t a crutch for sloppy composition or for wowing the viewer with mashed backgrounds and poorly thought out compositions. Wide open should be an option, not the only thing you do.
In the past such fast 50mm prime lenses were produced for two main reasons: gathering more light and appealing to wealthy amateurs looking for the exotic lens. TTArtisan has achieved two things here: a fantastic night shooting lens, and the exotic lens. The great thing is that the price makes it affordable for everyone, not just the affluent. I can’t fault the night shooting capabilities of this lens anywhere, it just rocks at night and it should. So yes, maybe is a two trick pony. The price is excellent for the specification. But overall it falls short on too many parameters for me.
The second trick: this was shot in the dark. Difficult to focus with so little light but the rangefinder is great for that. The settings, apart from wide open, were ISO 1600 and 1/60th of a second: this is where that speed comes in handy. Look at the detail on that focus plane: in the right situations this lens really delivers.
It’s time to cure my camera of its bad case of priapism and go back to the average guy size…
Some street shooting image samples:
Please let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Previous comments:
That's a very good review, thanks for it! I had some expectations with this lens but within reasonable limits (including pricing). My intention was to use it on A7iii and Leica M240 mainly for portraits. I can say that I did the right choice not buying it, I am afraid... I am missing the character of this lens. It is super/ultra fast but the images showed its nature. The background and foreground is not special... To be clear, it is nice piece of glass but far better results can be obtained with Zeiss Biotars or Pancolars after changing their mounts. 0.95 is usable only through an EVF so the camera doesn't matter that much. For example 55 f1.4 Pancolar gives mindblowing results, the photographs have kind of nobility. BTW for the M-mount I have my beloved Planar :)
Flavio Admin Wojtek • 6 months ago • edited
Hello Wojtek, thanks for your comments! I agree with you, I was expecting something more from this lens but we have to remember what the specification is in relation to its price. Probably we are looking for too much performance for a small price, and it just isn't possible...or is it? Just try the Voigtlander Nokton 50mm F1.2: I find it spectacular, and it costs just a little more than the TTArtisan. And the size is really small for the spec, I used it as my main lens for a long time. Having said that, my Planar is so small and light that it's just a pleasure to walk around with it and shoot with it. And both the Nokton and the Planar are consistently giving good results, no nasty surprises for me.
Flavio, maybe not the performance but some character. E.g. 7Artisan 50 f1.1 is IMHO fantastic lens looking at images it produces. It is not the sharpest, contrasty or best corrected glass but it has something. I think it's much better option than the 0.95 monster.
Flavio Admin Wojtek • 6 months ago
I hear what you are saying, but I don't look for character in my lenses: the content of the picture has to be the point of interest, not the rendering. The lens has to give me a reliable good performance and disappear from my thought process when shooting. If I have to compensate for lens issues or rely on the lens character to add to the picture I am not fully concentrating on getting the best framing and content to my picture, and that is the most important thing. I have never heard anybody comment "aaah, look at that lens rendering!", it's usually something about the content or visual appeal that draws the viewer's eye. The viewer doesn't care if it's a Leica or a Jupiter lens, as long as the image is not degraded. And usually character to me means degradation of the image. Which us geeks might like or not. I don't, but that is just my own personal opinion.
hbnorth • 2 months ago • edited
Thank you for your marvelous review. One of the best I've ever read.
You should try Leica's own Noctilux 50/0.95 and in time will find the TTAritisan actually isn't bad at all even if it costed twice as much.
IMO, as far as I can remember (I sold the Noctilux half a year ago and I have to admit that I never liked it), the current Noctilux 50 also has several flaws which you point out for TTArtisan one: spherical aberration, LoCA, astigmatism, extreme corner sharpness, non-disappearing vignetting. The 0.95 lenses are not about optical perfection. They are more about DoF, bokeh and characters. I could fairly trade these weaknesses for DoF and bokeh at f/0.95, but the Noctilux bokeh is swirly and nervous as well. Whats more, the field curvature is very prominent on Noctilux which leads to unpleasant bokeh. The 1 metre closest focusing distance on Noctilux is another deal breaker for me.
If TTArtisan one is a one trick pony, IMO, Noctilux isn't far from that. For optical excellence, Summilux 50/1.4 Asph and Apo-Summicron 50/2 are better choices.
Flavio Admin hbnorth • 2 months ago
Hello hbnorth, thanks for your kind comment! I would like to have a look at the Noctilux 0.95, just to see how it is. I would never buy that lens though, even if I could easily afford it. Too big and too niche: the paper this shallow depth of field gets old pretty quickly for me. I like lenses that are made to be used throughout their aperture range and focus range, because that’s how I shoot. I don’t believe in making the lens give character to my image, I want the image to speak through its content. That’s where I absolutely agree with you that the Summilux 50 1.4 ASPH and the Summicron-APO 50 are better choices: high performance, transparent lenses that let you shoot without ever having to adapt to the lens’ shortcomings. 0.95 is an extreme aperture and doesn’t make sense for me to own one.
Happy New Year!Happy New Year!
I'm not a lens 'character' believer either as those so-called characters are mostly introduced by optical flaws which makes images nasty. Summilux 50/1.4 Asph. is a very balanced lens IMO. Sometimes I feel APO-Summicron-M being too analytical. The upcoming M-mount Voigtlander Apo-Lanthar 50/2 might be a fantastic choice as well.
My instinct tells me that you will like Leica's Apo-Summicron-SL lenses, very sharp from corner to corner across all apertures. If you like mirrorless shooting style, they are definitely worth looking into. These lenses produce clean, transparent looks which even dwarf Apo M50/2.Flavio Admin hbnorth • 2 months ago
If I wanted to get back to EVF shooting the SL system would be my first choice. Simplicity and high quality. And the Summicron line is the ideal kind of lens for me, but the price is staggering. There is a point after which the gains in quality and ergonomics come at a price that is too high for those of us without a lot of disposable income. If price was no issue I would definitely go for it.
Great review, both of the lense and the write-up on how to calibrate it.
I just received my TT 50mm/.95 and found that with the exception of the incorrect calibration my unit did not have any of the other build quality issues you mention. No scratches and no appearance of dust/debris inside the lense.
The calibration of mine is about 99%. At 3m the focus is under focused by about 1 degree (focus ring turn).
Beyond that I am pretty happy. It is a one-trick pony but for me the value of this trick is much closer to the price of the TTArtisan lense than a real Leica Noctilux.
Flavio Admin James Kahan • a month ago
Thank you for the kind words.
I totally agree with you that this lens is a much, much better value than a Leica Noctilux 0.95. The Leica might have some even better qualities, but at what price! The deal breaker for me is the lateral chromatic aberration: if I had this lens and went out with it for a day I would want to use it throughout the day without changing to another. Wide open is appropriate for some shots but the vast majority of the shooting would be stopped down, and the LaCA can be really jarring for me, I did like the shallow depth of field a lot, it really performs there at the right distance, but at the end I much prefer a slower lens with a lot more quality across the board.