Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f/2 SL-II Aspherical Compact Pancake

Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f/2 SL-II Aspherical Compact Pancake Manual Focus Normal Lens for Canon EOS Film & Digital Cameras
Customer Ratings: 4 stars
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First of all, this lens is manual focus only, so, unless you're super experienced with manual focus cameras, you don't want to shoot portraits, wedding or pets with this lens. But if lack of AF doesn't turn you off, this lens is actually amazing.

EF35mm f/2.0 (the non-USM version) is an okay lens on full frame. It's not particularly sharp. it has rather poor chromatic aberration of magnification, so you get color in high contrast edges. The autofocus is slow, noisy and inaccurate. EF35mm f/1.4L is better in many regards, but it's not particularly sharp between 1.4 and 2.2. Chromatic aberration is also visible, though not as badly as the f/2 version.

You know what, Ultron 40mm is very sharp, shows almost no chromatic aberration, and produces nice smooth images in or out of focus. It is not perfect in the sense that it has some vignetting, some corner softness, some flare/ghost with strong light source, but it's pretty good for five hundred bucks. With no strong light in the view, the image is not very highly contrasty due to slight to mild flare, but it's not too bad.

These days, you can find 35mm f/1.4 manual-only lens from third party. They are reputed to be very high quality, but they suffer from the same shortcomings from EF35mm f/1.4L, namely, somewhat soft image. Ultron is sharper, yet produces soft out of focus blur. Another thing about Ultron is that it works with E-TTL metering. This is particularly useful for me, since I occasionally use a couple of 580EXII and 600EX flash units with pocket wizard. The other third party 35mm f/1.4 lenses do not have a microprocessor in the lens to allow E-TTL.

One suggestion. You have to manual focus with this lens, so I strongly recommend getting Ee-S or Eg-S super precision mat focusing screen for your 5D/5DII/6D. I would not recommend using this lens on 7D or 5D3 because the viewfinder screen is not interchangeable and it's not as nice to work with manual focus. There are third party screens that you can install in 7D, although it requires using some jeweler's screwdrivers. If you are okay with that, it'd be a fantastic lens on 7D as well. You can't really enjoy using manual focus lens using stock viewfinder screen! (This is true for TS-E 24/45/90mm lenses as well.)

The lens hood is kinda lousy. It does the job of protecting the front element, but not so good job of cutting stray light. Get a rubber hood with 52mm thread.

I didn't test the close up attachment. To me, that's kinda silly. If I had to do close up work, I'd use a different lens. But, I got excellent image quality at the minimum focusing distance without using the attachment.

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