This is simply a biased, gushing, overly long-winded, wordy, and well...BORING review reminiscent of high end audio reviews, such as those of tube amplifiers with output transformers wound with silver wire, which cost in the $100k range. To review an amplifier like that, is to decide you're going to like it before you review it. But even most of the decent audio reviews like this, do indeed find some tiny faults...while still winding up with a glowing conclusion (which is evident as you read the review of course...sound familiar?). To quote an auto reviewer of the Lamborghini Countach on a "60 Minutes" episode back in the 1980's...(who quoted Hemingway)..."Pheasant shooting is worth whatever price you have to pay"...or however the quote went.
I have no doubt the lens is most everything Lloyd says it is, but the review is too subjective, one-sided...too much like ad copy in a sales brochure...to be called a review. I could have written a better review!
The Countach is now seen for what it is...a crude, unreliable supercar of the day that was more style than substance. It got by on its looks and exterior rawness...while having an interior sophistication that even a 70's Pacer could match! What a bad joke!
But if the Countach were a camera lens, would it autofocus? I say yes...but yet this Zeiss made from an owl's eye, can't.
Lloyd's image of the Yosemite river with the warm low light, was less than convincing as to how black the blacks could go. So he then felt the need to make the next image in this "review" something that is almost all black. I say, this proves nothing. He says the shadow slider was at +100, but if the image was underexposed to begin with...that doesn't prove how deep a lens's blacks can go. Anybody can underexpose a shot and get deep blacks. He's really just doing the trick Nikon shooters are fond of doing, but that proves more the performance of the sensor, than the lens.
The biggest joke to me was before that...his first image of the cat. It took him 10 minutes to come up with THAT ??????? That's why serious photographers make use of lenses with autofocus, Lloyd!
It seems to me that all of these so-called "reviewers" need to learn how to become better photographers before they can take the full measure of photo equipment!
