Contents
Image Quality
With Zeiss, the image quality is always the primary draw, and the Batis 25mm is no different. The lens showed to be an impressive optic during my testing, though not without a few minor weaknesses.
Sharpness
The Batis 25mm f/2 is quite a sharp lens. Starting at f/2, the lens shows very fine detail and crisp accutance over the majority of the image frame, with only the very edges and corners showing a bit of softness. Stopping down yields corner to corner sharp images. While wide aperture shooting may not be the primary use of a wide-angle lens, it’s great to be able to use the lens at any aperture and have high levels of sharpness.
Bokeh
With a fast f/2 aperture, and especially given the Batis 25mm’s very close focus ability of a bit more than 8 inches, the 25mm f/2 is capable of blurring the background quite a fair bit. Zeiss did a fairly good job with the rendering of the out of focus areas with this lens, but it’s not a cream machine. The Batis 25mm shows some bokeh fringing due to longitudinal chromatic aberration, and thus specular highlights can take on a bit of a green ring. Also, sometimes the high contrast inherent to the lens rendering can lead to a bit of a chunky appearance in the background. It’s not unpleasant in most cases, but I don’t think most will be wowed by how the bokeh appears.
Contrast, Color, and Chromatic Aberration
The Batis 25mm, you may be glad to hear, holds on to that lovely Zeiss contrast profile, with crisp punchy images right out of camera, and the contrast profile doesn’t really change from wide apertures to small apertures. Color is also rich and vibrant at any aperture, as you’d expect from Zeiss. The Batis controls lateral chromatic aberration fairly well, such that it’s rarely field relevant and easily correctable in the odd situations where it is somewhat visible. However, longitudinal chromatic aberration is less well corrected, especially at wide apertures. In these cases, a prominent magenta or green fringe can show up in front of or behind the focus point. It’s not unusual for a fast wide-angle to show this tendency, though I wish it were a bit better corrected here.
Distortion, Flare and Vignetting
The Zeiss 25mm f/2 isn’t a distortion free lens, though the mild barrel distortion isn’t overly distracting either. In situations with lots of straight lines, you’ll want to apply the built-in profile in Lightroom, or adjust the distortion in post-processing, but for most shooting, it isn’t overtly visible. Much more apparent is the vignetting the lens displays. It’s quite visible at f/2, which one might expect. This is never a problem for me, as I tend to enjoy some edge darkening. What’s surprising to me is that the vignetting never really seems to go away. Even at f/11, there is visible darkening of the edges and corners. The hint of barrel distortion as well as the vignetting, here even at f/8, is visible in the shot below.
The Batis does perform fairly well against bright light. Some faint ghosting can be visible away from the sun when it’s in the frame, but it doesn’t dominate the image. The biggest issue with flare is some green ghosting that can appear around the light source itself. It’s not a bad performance, but it’s not excellent either.
thx jordan.
any thoughts on the batis vs the sony 28mm f2,aside from price and slightly wider fov?
I’ll actually have a direct comparison posted in the next few days. As you might expect, the Batis is optically better for the most part. Stay tuned for examples
The Batis is even better than Jordan says 😉
My copy is sharp from edge to edge even wide open. There might be a little less resolution in the extreme corners but you have to magnify the image by 200% to see that.
Color and rendering is also very special. Bokeh is nice actually and one can see this in the samples here, too. I have to disagree on that with Jordan, even though from a technical point he is right. Still very pleasant oof parts that never look distracting.
The 28mm Sony lens is nowhere near as good. I tried two copies of that lens because i would have loved to buy a smaller and lighter lens for my system for 1/3 of the price. Did not work. The Sony lens is soft in the corners and even in the center of the frame it is not on par with the Batis. It is much softer across the frame when you compare it to the 35 2.8 Sony, 55 1.8 Zeiss/Sony, the 85 1.4 Sony or this Batis.
wonderful stuff. was hoping the sony might be as good stopped down.
Hey Jordan,
Nice article/review.
I would like to read your opinion about new Loxia 21mm vs Batis 25mm
Which one of those are better, which one has a better CA, distortions, overall IQ, sharpness, etc…
Regards
I have literally only played with the Loxia 21mm for about 8 minutes at PhotoPlus, of which I took around 10 photos. I really can’t say definitively at this point. I will be reviewing the Loxia when it’s available.
Thanks for the article. Exactly what I was looking for.
Cool article. I use the 18mm Batis and the 21mm Loxia quite a bit but was thinking about edging up a bit towards a more standard lens. Very helpful.