When Zeiss introduced the Otus 55mm, we were blown away by the image quality. The corner to corner sharpness while shooting wide open was something we hadn’t seen in a DSLR lens in a long time. We anticipate the same results with their latest offering in the Otus family, the 1.4/85mm. The lens is expected to be available mid September.
“Optically, the Otus 1.4/85 stands out for its high image quality, even with an open aperture — as is true for the entire Otus range. Specifically, that means a neutral bokeh in the background, highly detailed images without any bothersome optical artifacts, consistently high resolution power across the entire image field, no color fringing or distortion, and an extremely high image contrast all the way into the edges. The imaging performance remains entirely consistent for all shooting distances. High apertures can be used even for close-ups right down to a working distance of 0.65 meters.
The lens consists of eleven lens elements in nine groups. One of the lens elements has an aspheric optical surface and six are made of special glass. The optical design is based on the Planar. Because the ZEISS Otus 1.4/85 is apochromatic, chromatic diagonal aberrations (longitudinal chromatic aberrations) are corrected with the help of lens elements made of special glass with anomalous partial dispersion. As a result, practically no perceptible color fringing appears on contrast-rich edges in front of and behind the focal plane. Bright-dark transitions in the image, and in particular highlights, are rendered free of color artifacts. In addition, the variable air spaces between certain lens groups (“floating elements design”) enable a consistently high imaging performance across the entire focusing range from 0.8 m to infinity.”
