If you want to squeeze out every bit of light from a dark scene than you this lens may be for you! The new Handevision 40mm f/0.85 lens is in Stock for the first time at BHphoto (Click here). Crazy lens…crazy price 🙁
Olympus US launched new deals on MFT stuff:
$50 off on the E-M10 at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
$100 off on the 12-40mm lens at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
$100 off on the 12-50mm lens at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
$50 off on the 17mm f/1.8 lens at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
$50 off on the 75mm f/1.8 lens at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto and GetOlympus.
More US deals:
Save $100 on the Open Box GH4 sold by [shoplink 47293 ebay]Samys one Bay (Click here)[/shoplink].
E-M1 for $999 [shoplink 47312 ebay]via eBay US (Click here)[/shoplink].
Panasonic 20mm II sells for around $280 via 6ave in two different kits: [shoplink 47439 ebay]Kit one (Click here)[/shoplink] and [shoplink 47440 ebay]Kit two (Click here)[/shoplink].
All current Olympus deals can be seen on that Amazon page and on that GetOlympus page.
42 Responses
Shipping to whom? Not me!
Please remove the first number and we’re all set. thank you.
The price on this lens makes the Pana/Leica Nocticron seem downright reasonable.
I’m a lapsed long time Canon user who left the system for M43, but:
For the $2,079 price of the new Handevision 40mm f/0.85 lens for M43 you can go to B&H right now and get a brand new, very small camera kit with a larger sensor:
Canon EOS Rebel SL1 DSLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS
Canon EF 85mm f/1.8 USM Lens
Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Lens
Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM Lens
$375 leftover for accessories
This is a great technology demo, but seems kind of pointless at that price. Those Canon lenses are not “L” glass but they’re quite good. I’d love to see samples of this from an M43 body shot wide open, but not sure who is buying this lens…
I guess, your suggested kit is just as uninteresting as this lens to most readers here. 😉
I own all of the above except for the small SL1 body and kit zoom. It was a good kit. Not as interesting to me as the M43 system, which is even smaller. At the time, M43 seemed to have a price advantage. That’s not as clear as it used to be, as the above illustrates. And the SL1 is comparable in size to the EM1 and GH4, although ugly and not nearly as capable. But much less expensive too. As an M43 owner, I could take the price of the f/0.85 and get:
Olympus M.ZUIKO DIGITAL ED 12mm f/2.0 Lens
Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 25mm f/1.8 Lens
Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 75mm f/1.8 Lens
+ $32 for accessories
My point is that the price of this lens buys a lot of other items. I’d love to better understand the value proposition from someone who owns one. Its an intriguing item.
Sounds much better! 😉
.85 to .95 is 1/3
1.4 to 1.8 is 2/3
Thanks Mike! Yeah, I’m not going back to Canon any time soon, but if this lens is providing a portrait field of vision with 1.7ish DoF, it ends up being not only wildly more expensive but also much bigger and much heavier than a boring old Canon APSC rig, and I can’t imagine that it is sharper wide open. It kind of defies conventional wisdom for M43 on many levels. Fun anyway tho!
Another comparison:
I love my M43 system but am always fascinated by Fuji’s wonderful style, handling, and reportedly extraordinary low light performance. I don’t want to start another system, but If i was desperate for very shallow DoF and/or better low light performance, I could buy a Fuji XPro-1 and the 56mm 1.2 for much less than the cost of this lens. And while Fuji’s auto focus performance has been a reason for my hesitance to buy in, this lens is manual focus, so the Fuji would be at least as good in that regard.
Canon? Eeeeewwww.
At least pick a Nikon if you’re gonna go conventional. 😉
Same boring thing 😉
I’d like to compare it to a Voigtlander Nocton 42.5mm f/0.95 that is half the price. I find it hard to believe that it will be able to justify its extreme price.
I can’t find an aperture chart that shows how many stops exist between f/0.85 and 0.95 and 1.4 or 1.8. Anyone know? I’d guess that .85 is 1.5 brighter than 1.4 and .25 brighter than .95, but not sure… Does this lens provide DoF of an 80mm f/1.4?
0.85 is half a stop faster than f/1.0 so it’s about 1/3 stop faster than 0.95. The next full stop down is f/0.7.
On m4/3, DOF will be like an 80mm f/1.7.
That’s about what I was imagining. My comment below wasn’t a call to return to mirrored bodies, just pointing out that this lens on M43 is enormous, heavy and very expensive. A nifty 50 on an APSC body is small, light and cheap. Which makes this lens part of bizarre world. Yes, you *DO* get faster shutter speeds, which, for moving subjects, is a benefit that IS can’t give you.
The numbers are calculated by powers of the square root of 2. Wikipedia has a good write up. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-number. f/.7 is 1 stop wider than f/1.0, 2 stops wider than f/1.4. f/.85 is about a half step wider than f/1.0. f/.95 is a faction between. I calculate it to be the square root of 2 to the power of -.15, which makes it about one sixth wider than f/1.0. Read the wiki write up.
thnx
Fun fact, true Leica lenses that cost less than this thing:
Leica Summicron-M 50mm F2.0
Leica Elmarit-M 28mm F2.8 ASPH
Leica Summarit-M 35mm F2.5
Leica Summarit-M 50mm F2.5
Leica Summarit-M 75mm F2.5
Leica Summarit-M 90mm F2.5
The more I think about it, the more extreme does this lens get…
For $1350 lucky Americans can get an m.Zuiko 75mm/F1.8- one of the best lenses money can buy – AND a metabones speedbooster that converts it to a 53mm/F1.0.
Poor Europeans have to pay the equivalent of $1800. 🙁
Hope some site will do a comparison of this combination vs IBELUX.
There is no mFT to mFT speedbooster. What are you talking about?
You are right, my mistake. I checked again, and it is only an OM version.
But this will even make it easier to adapt some fast and cheap OM glass and compete against the IBELUX. 😉
Unfortunately there is no such thing as fast and cheap OM glass. Except for the early versions of the 50/1.4 and the 50/1.8. But then you are better off with the oly 45mm!
Samples:
http://kipon.com/en/articledetail.asp?id=60
So comapared to the Panasonic Nocticron, that’s basically 1 stop faster, 51mm longer, nearly 3x heavier, same filter thread (67mm), manual focus and no IS… I guess if you shoot events in very low light or need that shallow a depth of field for portraits and you’re making good money from it (or have money to burn) it’s worth considering. It’s a niche product with a price that reflects that.
But on a Panasonic body, the Nocticron’s OIS would provide more than one stop of stabilization and better low light performance, unless your subject is moving. But the size and weight of this might not be ideal to hand hold either.
Exactly. So, unless you are shooting moving subjects where the shutter speed advantage outweighs the stabilisation advantage, the OIS in the Nocticron would give a greater exposure range even if the OIS was only good for two stops, but could be more.
And its a relative bargain compared to this! 🙂
Get TWO Voigtländer Nokton 42.5mm f0.95 lenses for the price of ONE of these.
It seems to be twice the size, so not a bad trade-off! 😉
Heck, even the 58mm filters are smaller and cheaper.
Who’da thunk that the Voigtländers would seem almost cheap compared to this and the Nocticron?
And do they include a DVD copy of the film ‘Barry Lyndon’ with the lens. If you don’t know what I’m talking about see here: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ac/len/page1.htm
Is that the price in some other currency? Surely thats an error. I’d consider $1000 if it were sharp wide open.
The real question here is: If someone handed you $2,079.99 and you had to spend it all this year on camera gear, what would you buy?
I’d probably get an RX100 Mk III and the Olympus 40-150. I have the panny 12-35 so that would fill out my m4/3 “pro zoom” quotient, and The Rx100 mk3 intrigues me as a no nonsense pocketable “good enough IQ” camera.
I’d be awfully tempted to go 42.5 / rx100 though, but I really do like my 45mm/f/1.8 oly lens.
On what body? For stabilisation I’m leaning towards the 30-100 panny at the moment.
Well I’m a stills guy working on an EM-5. That said, the panny is awfully tempting with it’s OIS just in case I decide to go with a panny body at some point down the road.
I only just got the 45 1.8. So much fun!
I’m waiting to see if the Panasonic LX8 and Fuji X30 can beat the RX100iii. I too want something very very small. The new rumored GM2 might even fit the bill.
i would spend prob half on a sony A7 and the remaining for a ticket to Jakarta 🙂
Good call 🙂
“We are currently working on our next project, the wide-angle IBEGON lens. With Sony releasing the new full-frame mirrorless A7/A7R camera, we have designed a high-speed telephoto APO mirror lens called the IBECAT, named for its sharp image capture, its lightweight construction and fast glass. Additional lenses are in development for full frame mirrorless cameras, including a tilt-shift lens and a compact fixed focal length lens.”
Maybe for someone shooting night video movies with a GH4?
It’s nice to see such “flagship” lenses on m43 (Ibelux, Nocti, Voïgt, PRO…), but those stratospherical prices aren’t appealing to beginners (they may go APSc instead). Hopefully there are some nice affordable lenses (Oly 45/1.8, Sigma…) and those old M42 primes… But I would love to see more affordable (100-200€) yet good quality lenses for the system to drive more “compact upgraders” in…
i think beginners prefer kit/zoom lenses instead, primes is more for people who already decided to focus on few focal lenghts only which suit their style best. 2000 is big money indeed for most people.
Just a thought: half the price, much more pocketable, just marginally slower: Canon FD 50mm, F0.95