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Lens review

Voigtlander Nokton 58 mm f/1.4 SL II

29 September 2010
Arkadiusz Olech

10. Focusing



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Owing to the fact that the range of the focus ring is wide and the ring itself works just fine the focusing is a very comfortable process. The in-focus indicator makes it even easier and because of the contacts you can enjoy that feature even on the simplest bodies. However you should not overestimate it and you shouldn’t trust it unconditionally because the body indicates the focus in a quite wide range, sometimes too wide to really help a photographer shooting a given scene.

Voigtlander Nokton 58 mm f/1.4 SL II - Focusing

The lens at the maximum relative aperture provides really shallow depth of field; that’s why if you use APS-C/DX sensors bodies, with smaller and darker viewfinders, not adapted to manual settings of the focusing screen, your efforts are bound to be very error-prone. The LiveView mode might rescue you, though; for some time now it has been added to every digital reflex camera launched on the market. It’s easier to set the right contrast when we deal with a big LCD screen image, blown up several or even a dozen or so times, than working with a dark viewfinder without any special focusing screen.