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I have - briefly - used this lens before so I am familiar with it before my purchase. It is phenomenal. I am a professional photographer and am familiar with quality equipment, and this is one of the very best. Quite literally, it blows all similar focal length lenses out of the water, including all 70-200 and 80-200mm zoom lenses, and even more so the 135mm lenses by Nikon or Canon. The clarity is astonishing, the evenness across the frame is superlative and the quality straight from its max aperture of f2 is breathtaking. It has extremely low distortions (important for me as a cityscape / architectural photographer) and the chromatic aberrations are miraculously just non-existent. For distant cityscape views it is superb but also for candid street shots of people or architectural details it is great. It not light by any stretch - its solid metal construction is well... very solid and hefty, but it is not uncomfortable to hand hold, as it feels quite balanced on a decent camera such as my Nikon D810 (similarly Canon 5D, etc). On a lighter camera/ APS-C format camera it might not make as much sense, and you will definitely not be getting the most out of this lens (like driving a Ferrari to pick up the dry cleaning). As a portrait lens, it is supreme. If you have used most of Nikon's telephoto zoom offerings - such as the 80-200 ED (which I have) or the newer 70-200mm VR II, it is quite hard if not impossible to take a tightly cropped headshot. The 80-200 has awful focus shift, and the 70-200 also suffers from focus breathing; making them pretty much useless for this. With this Zeiss 135mm APO, the focal length is perfect and you will end up with perfectly sharp, dynamic and vibrant images, with astounding clarity and micro contrast. Of course you need to focus it properly - and it is a manual focus lens - but if you are spending well over £1000 for any lens you should know what you are doing first. Sharpness and contrast are superb straight from f2 and only get better (until about f8-f11 when diffraction inevitably starts be be felt). There is practically no colour fringing at all, even wide open, astonishingly. The bokeh is soft and dreamlike. With this lens, you can get all of those wonderful effects of shallow depth of field - buttery smooth bokeh & perfectly circular out of focus highlights that you just cannot achieve with any zoom .....or with any other lens apart from some other Zeiss Otus or some rare esoteric lenses such as the Meyer Trioplan 100mm. Buy it, do as I am intending to do and dump your boring 70-200mm zooms, and enjoy true photography with manual focus and prime lenses - and you won't find a medium telephoto lens better than this one.Read full review
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A beautiful, incredible lens. But big and heavy.
Verified purchase: Yes | Condition: New