I've come to the conclusion these Zeiss lenses work excellently on the Sony Alpha cameras. I now have two of these wonderful lenses and I can't fault either of them. Both the Planar 50 f2 and the Tessar 85 f4 are very well built, focus rings are nice and smooth and don't have a long throw like a lot of the Voigtländer lenses. Both of these lenses produce stunning image quality on the A7R so assume that the quality will be the same on the A7.

These are two lenses I can certainly recommend for the A7R (and A7) and will be a part of my prime kit for those cameras. I will not be purchasing any other FE lenses (I have the kit 28-70) because these primes produce what I'm after from these cameras. I don't shoot sport and I take my time when manually focusing, although I have noticed it's much harder on these full frame sensors. I will be practicing a lot more to get proficient because I just love the look of the files. The two lenses mentioned above do not cost a fortune and are readily available with many retailers. Now I just need good 35mm and 135mm lenses and I'll be all set. I've just seen some excellent images from the Voigtländer 15 f4.5 so that will be my ultra-wide for this system. That will probably be used on the A7 because of the colour shift problems on the A7R, or it will be used on both when going for some monochrome images.

If you're wondering what you are looking at in the above image, it's water flowing over the top of a lock near where I live. You're looking down at the water from the top of the lock.

What a great combination these two make. The Zeiss Planar 50 f2 ZM T* is a very sharp lens and the A7R doesn't have a AA filter remember so it's going to bring out a little more sharpness from the lens. Just to show what this combination is capable of I just reduced these images to 1200px wide and did NOT apply any sharpening to the files. The B&W was converted using a gradient map this time (I didn't use my favourite converter from Nik, SFXII) because I find it does a better job of these files that SFXII. Files from the Fujifilm X cameras are a different thing but that is a photoblog post for another time.

I just couldn't resist this Sony Alpha A7, it's perfect for my type of photography. I love using older (and newer) legacy manual focus lenses on modern digital cameras. And this is principly the reason I purchased the A7. A bonus for the camera is the E mount which allows you to use all the native E mount lenses on the market today, albeit at a lower resolution. By lower resolution I mean 15MP files which is about the same as the best M43 camera on the market today, and with those you can safely print a 45cm x 30cm size but how often do you print at those sizes? So any smaller prints are going to be exceptional. Sony are planning on bringing out their FE lenses for the Alpha system but I'm not planning on aquiring any of those except the 28-70 I bought with the camera. I like at least one native lens for each system just to see how it actually performs with those lenses mounted.

Be careful when using rangefinder lenses on these Alpha models, just as you had to be careful what you used on the Nex-7. Colour shift will hapen with these lenses at focal lengths of 35mm ond wider. SLR lenses don't cause this problem and you have a lot of lenses to chose from. Everyone has their favourites and mine are C/Y and Pentax which have proved to be excellent on other systems.

However, that doesn't mean these lenses will perform well on the Alpha cameras because they are of course full frame. With the other systems the sensors used are either APS-C or M43 and using the sweet spots of the lenses, the central portion. Problems normally occur at the edges where smearing can be seen and testing each lens before use is a must on these cameras. I like using a 50mm lens, hence my purchase of the Zeiss Planar 50 f2 which performs very well on the A7. I thought I would pay a little more for one lens which I could use for years to come and no further purchases would be necessary. I will report back with some images from this lens when I have the time.

I think one thing should be said here about the Sony Nex family of cameras and that is the name Nex has been retired and no more Nex cameras will be brought to market. The Nex cameras have only be renamed Alpha cameras so we may see another Nex camera come to market only it will be called an Alpha.