The 12mm Is Here, A Mixed Bag, But Maybe It Is Over Now?
The little 12mm Vision Cine lens arrived just as I was writing my last post.
First thoughts;
It is “stumpier” than the two Spectrum lenses, making it feel even heavier.
The mount is not tight, something I am not used to with M43 and there is a slight catch when I dismount the lens, like a flange is slightly too big.
The focus and T-rings are the lightest of the bunch, the focus so light I can turn it with just the power of my crazed mind (well, almost).
It feels oversized on the M43 cameras, because it is so short and wide.
Images seem bright and even, good traits for a lens like this and in keeping with the stable. I especially like the muted colour and gentle highlight roll-off.
Slight near-far distortion setting in, so no more, no wider.
An odd choice?
The lens is a genuinely wide lens, but not so much on M43. For me, I am adding a wide cinema lens to my kit, not a super wide for my video run-n-gun outfit (I have those).
Already cropped on an M43 sensor, there is some obvious distortion wide open.
Still very sharp in the centre though. Edge performance for cinema is not such a big deal.
The math (all in full frame equivalent lengths for consistency).
My cinema sweet spot is 28-90mm. Anything wider or longer is placed in the modern videographer or specialists realm, where compression and distortion are more accepted and creatively useful.
The lens is soft on the corners wide open and has some distortion, but most of the time, that is invisible. I don’t think this one is a genuine contender as a stills lens, especially with all the excellent 12mm options I have in M43, but a good fit for video.
A 24mm in my “cinematographers” space is pushing it, but there is nothing much available in the 28-30 range in this class of cheaper cinema lens and with a 35, not a lot of point anyway. Even a slight crop does not remove the near-far expansion of the wider lens, but a well corrected 24 is doable-just.
Some funky flare and sun stars, but like the other two, quite well controlled.
A 12mm in M43 is the one choice, an 16-18mm would have worked in APS-C, but no such beast is available in this price range. The 12mm in L-mount would have been an 18mm, which is too much.
Added depth of field with only a slight feeling of near-far expansion. A well placed 35mm will be the preferred environment lens, but sometimes that space is not available. A little 3D pop?
This has the huge advantage of adding my G9’s into the cinema kit with more features, extra depth and multiple angles, but there is more.
Nice gentle colour, good Bokeh and close focus. It will do.
If 1080 or near abouts is my output and it mostly will be, the G9’s have a feature that cannot be ignored. In 1080, they still use their full sensor area, so for their loss-less teleconverter modes no quality is sacrificed. They do not just crop in, they use the same number of pixels just from a smaller area of the overall sensor.
The same leaf as my last post. The colour is mostly warmish, somewhere between the 35 and 50.
The G9 Mk1 (2.7x) turns the 12mm into a 24 at one end and 65 at the other. The G9 MkII (1.6 and 2x) offers a 24, 38 and 48, almost the perfect trio.
Also the lens has some dodgy optical characteristics that cropping mitigates to some extent.
Can it be that this one lens can be an all in one cinema lens answer?
The left image is T2.9, the right T5.6. Pretty consistent except for my framing.
If it gets a mate which would be excessive, I would be looking at the 35 T1.05. This is respected as the best of the Vision series and comes in at a 70/112/140/190 respectively (so 24, 38, 48, 65, 70, 112, 140, 190). The only logic behind this would be to add options to its role as a “B” cam that my Lumix and other glass cannot do.
We will see.