p.2 #1 · DJ-Optical launched a 50mm f/1.0 lens for Leica M mount
Could be. I'm actually picking it up myself as I'd be in the city they are in and they are fearing that my return date is too tight for them to ship by courier.
I would get to meet the optician in person and chat a bit. So, I'd surely check with him to see what his philosophies were going into designing the lens.
Fred Miranda wrote:
Perhaps he paid close attention to field curvature, since the TTA 50/0.95 is the only ultra-fast 50mm M-mount lens with a neutral field curvature. Most others, including the Leica (f/0.95 and f/1), produce extreme outward curvature.
p.2 #2 · DJ-Optical launched a 50mm f/1.0 lens for Leica M mount
I paid DJ Optical a visit while in Shenzhen to pick up my lens.
The lens was finalized but they were having some issue with the final box design and production. Thus, it hasn't shipped yet but I grabbed a copy and they were kind enough to give it a custom serial number (kid's Bday) as one of the first retail copies out of their store besides prototypes.
Initial impression:
The lens feels solid and snappy and well made. The design and body color is perhaps the best I have seen in Chinese lens makers. It was original, sleek and balanced well in my hand with a Z8/M9-P.
Now, I went on and chatted with the lens designer for almost an hour.
His business focuses on being the ODM for other Chinese lens brands. A couple of notable lenses are 7Artisans 28mm F1.4 (the earlier one had "DJ Optical" in the inscription), TTArtisan 90mm F1.25, TTArtisan 50mm F0.95 as mentioned earlier and so on. He's got a huge display shelf in the office with all of his previous works as well as some prototypes. Easily over 100 lenses.
I've only managed to take some shots on the street after I picked it up. I'll organize them a bit and post here.
p.2 #3 · DJ-Optical launched a 50mm f/1.0 lens for Leica M mount
So, I'm going to try to summarize my hour-long chat.
1. Design philosophy
The reason to design this 50mm F1.0 was to create a fast lens with high image quality given advancement in optical material and coating techniques at an affordable price point. He went with a more traditional optical design in order to achieve weight/size saving. His idea is, you could build lenses like Sigma or even Nikon Noct 58mm F0.95 by continuously stacking exotic lens elements. But that comes at a cost of weight and size, which he asked himself the question, what's the point of having a lens with super high performance when you are simply not going to carry it around because it's too heavy/big.
Thus, the goal was a lens with 3 things in mind:
Relatively small and light
High image quality
Smooth bokeh rendering
He decided to not include an aspherical element because even though you could achieve saving in size, it usually comes at a cost of bokeh quality with things like onion ring. There are also ways to deal with onion rings in precision molded aspherical elements, but that would also mean additional steps of processes and vastly increasing the cost. Instead, he decided to use a slightly larger lens element (62mm thread vs. 58/60mm in Leica Noctilux) with high index value to best counter things like corners.
As far as image quality is concerned, one of the main issue the designer tried to address was the field curvature. Too much correction, it makes the image flat, especially in super fast lenses, where you have a very thin DoF that ultimately leads to a 2D looking image within the area that's in focus. Too little correction, you get all the issues in bokeh like swirly bokeh, saggital aberration... etc.
The designer wanted a fast lens that even within the limited DoF, one could still get a very clear sense of layers in the imagery.
Zoom-in to show the bokeh balls.
All pics here were shot wide-open with Nikon Z8 with Techart Adapter. Some I did some cropping, but other than that, 0 PP and exported using Lightroom.
Not the most scientific testing, but I think they showcase what the lens does in different lighting conditions. I will continue in next post about something we discussed over the 1hr chat.
