Love the look of this lens, love the apparent sharpness of it. I'd still like to see more samples of the bokeh in different situations before I put the money down. I'm not blown away by what I've seen to date, and ooF rendering in this kind of wide aperture lens is pretty huge. I'd be very happy to be wrong about this.
When the background is blurred a lot, the bokeh will look good with any lens. This is what page 1 of this thread shows. This lens really struggles with the bokeh when the blur is, say, 5-10 pixels wide.
And that is the issue. I've been watching the group pool at Flickr (
http://www.flickr.com/groups/2109177@N20/) and, frankly (I'm not trying to be offensive), I haven't been overly impressed with much, yet. There are some rare exceptions, but overall, the images seem to lack that special quality that I have seen out of the 35L. In all fairness, early images aren't always the best. People don't always know how to use a lens to its full potential.
Bokeh quality is huge in a wide aperture lens, and I wonder if this lens didn't got a little too far into the sharpness end and lost that quality. I have seen very little soft, creamy bokeh out it.
