To make a long story short, we`ve re-shot our studio scene shots of the Sony a9 with the FE 85/1.8 lens, and they`re much sharper. We apologize for misleading any of our readers, but it`s a long story - see below. To jump to the images, just click the button, but we do encourage you to read the full text as well.
Just take me to the pictures!
The Long Story
You may have noted on the studio scene page of our Sony a9 review that we admitted to having quite a bit of difficulty focusing the camera with the new Sony 85mm F1.8 lens in magnified live view. The maximum magnification (x9.4) on the camera LCD made it very difficult to fine tune the 85/1.8 precisely. Multiple AF-S attempts yielded shots varying in sharpness, and we were often able to attain better results manually focusing. But the only way to check each shot was to shoot tethered and check each shot magnified on a monitor. Of course, every time we thought we`d nailed focus, we`d try nudging the camera or focus ring just a bit to make sure we couldn`t do any better, and then realize we`d fallen off a bit.
And so the search began again and again, with the quest for perfect focus ending up a bit of a fool`s errand. We finally tuned focus to what we thought was reasonable (we look for maximum aliasing in the central Siemens stars, and color aliasing in the text), and shot our entire studio and dynamic range tests.
Subsequently, we got lots of complaints about the a9 being soft.
The Lens Factor
Was it the lens? This is the first Sony FE camera we`ve shot without the stellar Zeiss 55mm F1.8. We`ve had a long-standing policy of shooting with an on-brand 85mm equivalent lens per-system, to maintain equal distance from camera to target, something that allows for all images to be rendered with equal perspective. With Sony`s recent release of the razor sharp FE 85/1.8, we thought we`d stick to our policy and give it a try.
But we don`t blindly switch lenses for a system; we first verify:
The ...
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