Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

This lens is a joy to use. The focus ring is tight and accurate. It's VERY sharp at its sweet spot (f/5.6 - 8). And it's TINY! It makes my 7D look like an oversized point and shoot. It's definitely much more discreet. It's perfect for street photography.

This lens is great for anyone who wants to learn proper manual focusing. The aperture and distance marks are clear and accurate on the lens, and shows you the different ranges of depth of field according to aperture size. This is how cameras were focused before autofocus, and in many cases may be faster than autofocus using zone focusing techniques.

The lens shines even more when used with an APS-C camera. The crop targets the sweet spot for sharpness and vignetting, and has focal lenght equivalent of 30/31mm. This is just a little bit wider than the classic 35mm. Again, perfect for street photography.

I bought this lens for doing street photography with my 7D. It complements the body perfectly, and makes it less threatening for candid shots. If I could say anything bad about it, it would be edge sharpness. It's not as good as the center, but it's not too soft either. Overally, you would have to pixel peep in order to find flaws in the sharpeness.

But you shouldn't pixel peep. It's a bad habit.
Friends don't let their friends pixel peep.

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

wow, amazing lens. i could not be any happier. image quality is outstanding and easily on par with my L series lenses. ive used voigtlander wide angles on both my leica m8 and 5d mkll and im always blown away with build and image quality.

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

Portraits, landscapes and stitched panoramas. Amazing color, bokeh and sharpness. Very smooth movement, great construction and solid feel.

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

Landscape panorams photos and people, the lens has wonderful depth giving 3-D quality to images, it does fall off at the edges but that suits my images perfectly. The build and solidity are first rate, the focus is silky smooth, buy it, you won't regret it. I bought it for total manual control in a digital world and have not looked back.

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

Great lens for travelling.
Awesome for landscape and creative pictures.
Can take sharp pictures up to f/4.0.
Looks a little dark at viewfinder with focusing screen EG-S but you get in used to it.
Have a very smooth focus ring and is very compact.
Worth every cent.

Comments about Voigtlander Color Skopar 20mm f/3.5 SL-II Aspherical Manual Focus Lens:

Using this lens on my Canon 5D Mark II as a companion to the Voigtlander Ultron 40mm f2.0 makes a perfect ultra light power house combination.

Best use is a great landscape photo/video lens that also works well for getting interesting perspectives for tight situations. Smooth and quiet focusing works so well for video that I only prefer to shoot video on the Voigtlander lenses over Canon lenses. The lens can also focus real close (8") and provides many new possibilities that my other lenses couldn't do. I have a 24-105mm and find the 20mm to be of enough of a difference to use with my other lenses and not replace for wide angle shots.

This is very practical lens for me as it does not give a fish-eye type distortion. There is noticeable barrel distortion at the corners and is exaggerated when objects get closer. The corners are very soft at f3.5 but sharpen at f5.6 and smaller.

I find the DOF marks on the lens are far better to use for finding hyper-focal distances than other brand lenses. Manual focus is my preference and I am glad that there is no auto-focus as this makes me compose my shots much more accurately.

I would buy this lens over again with no hesitation. Price point is great considering the build quality is beyond Canon's L line. IQ is on par or better in my opinion for lenses with similar specs. Size is what makes this lens a permanent addition in my bag.