LensTip.com

Focusing

The Voigtlander Apo Lanthar 2/28 is a manual lens; you focus with the help of a special ring, 23 mm wide. The middle part of this ring is occupied by ribbing with a very fine texture that is also noticeably protuberant. When you touch this part of the lens, you can feel the ring at once. Under the ribbing you find a distance scale expressed in feet and meters. The ring moves smoothly and is properly damped. Running through the whole scale needs a turn through an angle of about 140 degrees, a significant value allowing you a very comfortable performance.

The depth of field scale is supposed to help with focusing; it features markings from f/4.0 to f/16.

After some practical tests, I admit that Voigtlander is a joy to use. If you are familiar with manual lenses, you shouldn't experience any problems. Of course a significant depth of field, connected to this angle of view, helps a lot. The presence of contacts, ensuring you proper communication with a camera body and automatic blowup when you move the focus ring, is also very helpful.

Focus breathing

Focus breathing tests show reframing images as you oversharpen them. We conduct the test by manually passing from the minimum focusing distance to infinity with the aperture stopped down; then we check how the field of view of the lens changed as a result.

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A frame change ranging from 0 to 5%, we consider to be low. Between 5 and 10%, you can speak about medium levels. Usually such values also constitute the maximum efficiency level of any breathing compensation algorithms present in some bodies. Between 10 and 15% focus breathing is high; above 15%, its level can be called very high.

Below we present the test video of the Voigtlander lens:

Based on the recording above, comparing freeze-frames before and after oversharpening, we can estimate that the breathing of the tested lens amounts to about 10.5%, and it means a borderline between medium and high level of this aberration. This slip-up is nothing tragic, but the tested Voigtlander certainly shouldn't be praised for its performance in this category.