Excited to start contributing to this thread. Recently back into the photography world after a hiatus; now have a Batis 25, 40, and 135 for my A7CII. This was a quick shot with the 135 at f/2.8.
Last shot for my Batis 40. It's moving to a new home today and I'll (finally) upgrade to the Sony 35GM.
Fun fact; I bought the lens for €650 back in 2021, and sold it for €650 in 2026. 5 Years of free use
Alan Parker wrote:
Last shot for my Batis 40. It's moving to a new home today and I'll (finally) upgrade to the Sony 35GM.
Fun fact; I bought the lens for €650 back in 2021, and sold it for €650 in 2026. 5 Years of free use https://i.imgur.com/RMTIVHE.jpg
I wish you much enjoyment and many beautiful pictures with your new lens.
I actually paid full price for the Batis 40 back in the day. When I bought it, the 35mm f/1.4 GM had just been released, which I could have gotten for a small premium compared to the Batis. At that time, the Batis 40 caused quite a shitstorm in the tech forums because it would stop down in close focus and the eye autofocus was supposedly inaccurate. Nevertheless, I bought the Batis 40 because I was very curious. To this day, I haven’t regretted the purchase.
The developers of the Batis 40 must have wondered back then how to design an f/2 lens that is still attractive enough to justify its price. Sure, it had almost (though not quite) the sharpness and resolution of the Voigtländer Macro APO-Lanthar 65mm f/2, which was the benchmark for sharpness and resolution at the time. However, there are certainly faster lenses with even more sharpness and resolution (which, in my opinion, has no impact on image quality or the beauty of a photo).
What emerged was a lens that shares the characteristics of the other Batis lenses, only in my opinion, these traits are much more pronounced—which isn’t always good. I’ve actually taken pictures with the Batis 40 in the summer, under the high midday sun, that were completely unusable because the extreme contrast made them jarring to look at and unharmonious. Sometimes it didn’t help even when I drastically reduced contrast and pushed the shadows to the maximum in Lightroom.
Although the Batis 40 is a real “beast” when it comes to contrast—one that needs to be tamed—it has become my absolute favorite lens. Over the years, it has brought me a lot of joy with beautiful images, and I really like the character of the Batis 40. It’s anything but clinically sterile; instead, it often has a lot of “pop.” I hope it has a long life. By the way, the eye autofocus has always worked very accurately and extremely quickly for me. Only in very low light does the AF sometimes struggle a bit.
Schwarzlicht wrote:
Only in very low light does the AF sometimes struggle a bit.
I have noticed that the AF just can't keep up with my son Generally speaking it was never the most reliable or accurate in my opinion; often picking the 'square over face' to the real Eye-AF. Could be user error, I don't know.
I will miss the Batis 40 and have a lot of fantastic pictures to think back on. It was just time to let go and try something else; and more importantly let another photographer try a Zeiss lens at a reasonable price.
I am now on my second Batis 40. I purchased the first copy after Zeiss fixed the AF issue via firmware update. I didn't experience any AF issues. The image quality was really great and I was happy with it. But I had the chance to pick up the GM 35mm at a reasonable price. I sold my Batis shortly after that. However, for whatever reasons I missed that lens... and I bought another copy that I ended up paying slightly less than what I sold the first copy for. My second copy performs at the same level as the first one. Phew! The only aspect I don't like it about that lens is the form factor; it is on the bulky side for what it offers for travel purposes. No issue for using it locally though. Here are 2 images taken using the second copy...
