The older Sony Zeiss 85mm f1.4 for A mount is a lens that has a beautiful look to it — and I state that even today. When I reviewed the lens back in 2012, I was shocked at the image quality rhat it was able to produce. It was better than so many other lenses that I’d used at the time and much easier to work with than Canon’s 85mm f1.2 L at the time. My favorite thing about it, however, was how it rendered skin tones of various different people.
I’ve spoken about this many times, and perhaps I am the only major camera tester that really cares about this to the point where I make it a point of testing all cameras and lenses. But something about this lens made it so that all kinds of skin tones looked incredible. I’d know — back then I did the tests.
This lens is from a time when you had to stop it down to really get “better” sharpness. It wasn’t really until Zeiss invented to Otus lenses that the sharpness wide open was really something unique at least for DSLR lenses. Leica had been doing this for rangefinder lenses for a few years previous.
What was really unique about this lens, however, is how it worked for street photography. This lens had a working and very effective depth of field scale. So it could be used easily for zone focusing if and when you wanted to do so. Granted, it has loud focusing motots. But if you’re in a busy outdoor space, people probably won’t even pay you any attention. Instead, you’ll be able to get stunning photographs that will look completely different from lenses that you can shoot with today.
I truly miss lens designs like this and I wish that they made more of a return instead of something designed for photo and video together.