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Thypoch Simera 35mm F1.4 M-Mount Review: A Summilux-M Alternative?
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Jan 21, 2024
Photographer Dustin Abbott shares a thorough, real world review of the new Simera 35mm F1.4 for Leica M-mount from new lensmaker Thypoch | Read the Text Review: | Visit the Image Gallery: | Purchase the Thypoch Simera 28mm F1.4 @ B&H Photo https://bhpho.to/48z58lI or Adorama https://howl.me/clpJirCHdU5 Check out the DA Merch here: https://bit.ly/TWIMerch | Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/dustinabbott | On the Web: http://dustinabbott.net/ | Sign up for my Newsletter: http://bit.ly/1RHvUNp | Instagram: http://bit.ly/DLAinsta | Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1nuUUeH | Flickr: http://bit.ly/1UcnC0B | 500px: http://bit.ly/1Sy2Ngu Follow Craig @ https://www.instagram.com/craigstoffersen/ Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo: http://bhpho.to/1TA0Xge Adorama: https://howl.me/cjU0LKdp3LN Camera Canada: http://bit.ly/DLACameraCan Sony Canada: https://www.thesonyshop.ca/?ref=abbott Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HrY64d Amazon Canada: https://amzn.to/3qG1p18 Ebay: http://bit.ly/DustineBay Into the AM Clothing: https://bit.ly/intotheAMda and use code DUSTIN10 for 10% off Make a donation via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/dustinTWI ============================= Table of Contents: ============================= 0:00 - Who is Thypoch? 1:20 - Fantom Wallets
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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you my review of the second of the
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TIPOC Samara lenses. This is the TIPOC Samara 35mm F1.4 and this is for Leica M-Mount and only for Leica M-Mount
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Now TIPOC obviously is a new lens maker and this is their first two lenses that are coming
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to market and they are targeting the Leica M-Mount rangefinder crowd with these Samara
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lineup of lenses that are very nicely made, optically interesting as we'll explore here
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today, and obviously come in at a much, much lower price point than their Leica counterparts
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Now the brand TIPOC that you're probably not familiar with is a new brand
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The name comes from two old English words that are focused on your individuality and
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living in the moment. Similar is the word Samara, which is a Greek word and it refers to living in the moment
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living in the now. And so obviously they are focused on trying to at least market into the individuality
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and that freedom of expression that is often a part of the Leica aesthetic
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So we're going to dive in today and see whether or not they've actually pulled it off and
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are these compact lenses, including this 35mm F1.4, are they worth buying
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Well let's jump in detail and let's explore together. So I've obviously am reviewing the silver version of this lens, but both of these lenses
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do come in both silver and black editions. They retail for $699 US dollars
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Now obviously for a manual everything lens, a fairly compact lens, it may not sound particularly
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cheap, but when you consider that the kind of direct competitor from Leica is the Summicron
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M 35mm F1.4 and it retails for $5,600 US dollars, all of a sudden this is sounding
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pretty much like a bargain considering it is, you could buy eight of these for the price
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of that single Leica lens. Everything here is really beautifully made. It is all metal and glass and that is right down to the caps, which are really beautifully
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made, great attention to detail. The lens hood, which is a rectangular design with 45 degrees on the four corners, that
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looks kind of similar to what some of the other rangefinder designs are out there
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So they're obviously logging into that overall aesthetic there. But everything here is really, really nicely made and as we're going to explore, I really
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was impressed with the attention to detail in a number of areas that for a new lens maker
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they really seem to check a lot of boxes of some maturity in their lens design
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Now the lens is very compact. In fact, this is the smaller of the two lenses
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It is 54mm in diameter or 2.1 inches. It has a 49mm front filter thread and it's a little bit shorter in length
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It's right under 51mm in length or 2.1 inches and it is 325 grams or 11.6 ounces in weight
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And so it runs about 15 grams less than what the equivalent Leica lens is
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So it does feel like it has some heft to it, but at the same time, it's that kind of density
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of a quality construction and it's not an actual heavy weight. It still is very nice and balances even on compact cameras quite well
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The focus ring here is nicely designed. There's a few attentions to detail there that I want to highlight
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There are nicely scalloped sections that have ribs on each of them on the high points
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and make it very easy to grip and to move. The focus action is very smooth, but there is on each end, there is a differentiation of that
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On the wide end, there's a recognition of the fact that most rangefinder bodies will
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only focus as closely as 70cm. And so there is a friction point there that you'll run into a little bit of resistance
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before you can push all the way to the minimum focus, which in this case is 45cm
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So there's a little bit of focus range that is kind of behind what is similar to kind
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of a detent for an aperture ring, something similar to that. And then on the other end, there is actually an infinity lock
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And the purpose of that is if you put it in the infinity lock position, hopefully it's
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aligning perfectly with infinity, which on this copy, it does seem to do by the way
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But then also it gives you a fixed and rigid position that makes it easier to mount or
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unmount the lens because everything is not rotating while you try to do that
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But the focus throw here is about 100 degrees. It moves very nice and smoothly
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I will note that if you're trying to focus towards the minimum focus point, if you're
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doing a focus throw, hitting that kind of detent does kind of throw off a focus throw
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So I don't love it for that reason. But then again, I'm not testing it on a rangefinder body
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So it's not a feature that I actually need. What I do find is obviously there is a fairly significant difference in the magnification
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between the front object you can see in this focus pool and then the rear object
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The rear object is at that 70cm point. The front object is at the 45cm point
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So it shows you that extra bit of magnification you're going to get if you focus all the way
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to minimum focus. Now this lens is an internally focusing design and so nothing is going to move in or out
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during focus action. Now the aperture ring also shows a few unique attention to detail
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The most notable of that is on the back side in one of the ray sections
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It actually is a switch that allows you to move between a clicked and a de-clicked aperture
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And so when it is clicked, you have the typical 1 third stop detents at the large apertures
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until you get to f8 and after that it is single stop detents
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But overall everything feels good there. And then if you switch it into the de-click mode, everything moves nice and smoothly to
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allow you to do aperture racking. And another kind of unique thing that you'll see is rather than a traditional hyperfocal
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markings, there is these really interesting dotted areas on the area between the two rings
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that will actually light up, not light up, but rather red will show behind the cutout
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portions that will actually show when you're getting into the various apertures as you
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move up to them. It will show you a new point to put infinity at for hyperfocal distance
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And so it's kind of an interesting touch there. Now we noted that the aperture iris itself is really beautiful
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There are 14 rounded blades and it does a really fabulous job of maintaining a circular
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shape, which means that as you stop the lens down, you'll continue to get round or circular
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bokeh highlights. Even though this can focus down closer than the standard 70 centimeters that will make
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you switch into live view to focus on a rangefinder body, 45 centimeters is still not particularly
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close for a 35 millimeter lens. And so as a byproduct, you're going to get a pretty low magnification of 0.09%, somewhere
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in that range. So nothing to write home about. I was able to get closer than that because I did a lot of my tests on the TechArt LMEA-9
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adapter, which functions almost like an extension tube that allows you to focus more closely
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than that, which can be handy obviously in these kinds of situations
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Overall, however, the attention to detail is really nice here. There's more features than what I anticipated on the lens and it does handle really nicely
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So let's talk about the image quality. And in this section, I'm going to give you an overview of image quality and then we'll
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do an optical deep dive at the very end for those of you that want to go deeper
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So as we take a look here at the lens design, this is a design of nine elements in five
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groups that includes one aspherical and three high refractive index elements. And so those help to achieve a nice optical performance
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Also there is a floating element group that allows you to get better performance up close
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which is also appreciated. A little bit of a modern touch there in the design
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Now if we take a look at the MTF chart, you can see that it is solid, but it's not exceptional
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One difference that I did see compared to the two lenses is that wide open, it's fairly
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comparable, but there's a little bit more here when stopped down, a little bit more
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improvement when stopped down. So I think the 28 millimeter is a hair better wide open, but doesn't have as much latitude
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for improvement when stopping down, whereas this lens does is less good wide open, but
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does make do a better job when stopping down. So as far as kind of looking at some of the various details of the optical performance
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this lens has next to no distortion. There's about a 1% to 2% distortion there and so not really hardly worth worrying about
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Much more worthy of correction is the fact that there is a good solid three stops of
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vignette and it is, rather than being completely linear like some Zeiss lenses, where it kind
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of gradually moves up, it's not concentrated in the corners, but there's more in the corners
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than what there is as it moves forward. As a byproduct, I find that particularly since I'm shooting in winter with snowy foregrounds
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I really do feel like I need to correct it sometimes when I'm shooting wide open because
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the darker corners are just not all that flattering. Now in other seasons and in other conditions, it's less noticeable
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Now the lens is not bad when it comes to controlling aberrations, but the 28 millimeter
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is better. You can see here for longitudinal chromatic aberrations that there's a little bit more
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particularly of the green fringing after the plane of focus. Likewise, you probably won't be able to see it here on your screen, but at a higher magnification
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on my 4K monitor, I can see that there is a little bit of lateral chromatic aberrations
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as well. Neither are extreme, neither too disruptive to images, but just be aware that you will
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see in particular a bit of that longitudinal chromatic aberration on some of your shots
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Now in terms of the resolution at F1.4, the center is pretty good, mid-frame okay, corner
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is pretty weak. By the time we stop down to F2, you'll see that contrast is improving in the center and
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the center is looking quite excellent. By about F2.8, you'll see the mid-frame looking similarly good and it's about F4 where the
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corners start to catch up with that performance. When you're stopped down to landscape apertures of F5.6 or F8, you're going to get really
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sharp and consistent performance all across the frame. As I said, it does sharpen up nicely
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Now diffraction is minimal at F11, but quite noticeable by F16. So you're probably going to want to stay at F11 or brighter apertures than that
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Don't go past that to F16 because you will take a hit in your image quality from that
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I did find that my real-world results look good even though contrast isn't off the charts
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Real-world images look fairly good and so I was happy with the combination mostly because
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the bokeh is so nice from the lens. Now if we break that down, you can see that there's a little bit of that geometric deformation
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near the edges of the frame. Call it a cat eye or a lemon look at F1.4, but by F2, bokeh highlights, specular highlights
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are mostly circular all across the frame. And smaller than that, they remain circular because that aperture iris is so round
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So the bokeh quality is right amongst the nicest that I've seen from a 35mm lens and
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I've reviewed a lot of 35mm lenses over the years. Now I did find that there is a little bit more flare artifacts with the 35mm than what
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I saw with the 28mm, but it's still quite good. Particularly wide open, there is minimal ghosting or veiling
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When you stop it down to small apertures, you're going to see just a little bit more of that ghosting or flare pattern coming across
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And so it's a little more pronounced than what it was with the 28mm, but still quite
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good for a large aperture prime. We'll also note that the look of the 14 bladed Sunstar is quite nice
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And so much more good than bad when it comes to the optical performance
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And I do think that they're working with pretty good optical glass because color looks nice
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and that the kind of the contrast level of colors looks nice to me
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And so I really quite like the look of the images I was able to take with the lens
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So in conclusion, I do slightly prefer the 28mm to this 35mm, but they're both really
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nice lenses optically. I like the look and the feel of the images that I was able to get with either lens
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And I think these Typoc Samara lenses, they really are quite nice
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My question is, is the Leica M mount crowd, are they looking for budget alternatives to
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the Leica lenses? If you're paying $8,000, $9,000, $10,000 for your camera body, how concerned are you about
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getting a lens for $699? I don't know, to be honest. And I guess the market will determine whether or not there is a subset of those that have
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put down major money for a Leica body, but are interested in getting a relatively inexpensive
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lens, particularly one that has a lot of the character of the native Leica lenses
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If you want to see more about the lens and more photos from it, you can look either in
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my text review or in the image gallery that is linked in the description down below
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There are also buying links there. And now if you would prefer a deeper dive into the optical performance, let's jump into
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that together. So let's start by taking a look at vignette and distortion
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You can see by looking at the result on the left that there is a very minimal amount of
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barrel distortion, but there is a more significant amount of vignette. And if you take a look at the wide open pattern, you can see that it is largely concentrated
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in the corners. And so that does make for a little less clean correction
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So here on the right, you can see my manual correction. There is no profile for this, and I don't know if there'll be a profile, but it's not
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going to be something that's corrected in camera because there is no electronics to
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identify the lens. So as far as distortion correction, I just dialed in a plus one
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You're probably not going to notice anything in real world use, so that's probably not
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an issue. Vignette, however, you can see that it's concentrated in nearly three stops in the corners, and
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I could probably could even go a hair further than that. You can see there's still a little bit left there
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The midpoint, I moved it over to 20, and you can see if I move it over further, we end
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up with an overbright center and not necessarily a balance. And so really, I could pull it back even further because it is mostly concentrated in the corners there
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I also did see more longitudinal chromatic aberration than what I saw in similar tests
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with the 28 millimeter. You can see that there's a little bit before the plane of focus, but a little bit more
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pronounced in the green after the plane of focus. And when it comes to lateral chromatic aberration, you can see if you look closely here, there's
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just a little bit there in some of these transitions from black to white, but probably
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not enough that you're going to detect this in real world situations
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Overall, that's not really a problem. Now here is a side-by-side comparison between the 28 millimeter on the left and the 35 millimeter
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on the right, and I've tried to shift the tripod to make the framing as close as possible
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It is quite hard to do with different focal lengths, but we are close here
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So we can see looking at our subject, and I focused on this C here, we can see that
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there is just a little bit better contrast on the 28 millimeter, a little bit deeper
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color saturation in that area right there. But also we can see that both of them do exhibit some fringing on this, the very kind of high
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contrast area between the parts of the pineapple and then the bright light beyond
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They're just a little bit more pronounced. You can see here comparing 28 millimeter and then the 35 millimeter, just a little
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bit more on the 35 millimeter. If we take a look at the rest of the image, kind of the defocused area, the bokeh is going
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to be ever so slightly softer from the 35 millimeter, but frankly, they are very, very close
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There's not a whole lot else to distinguish between the two lenses. So here's the test chart, and we're going to take a look at the results at 100% magnification
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So this is a 61 megapixel Sony a7R V that I'm doing the test on, which is a little bit
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higher than the highest resolution Leica body currently available. So in the center of the frame, no complaints there
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I mean, everything is nice and detailed. Contrast isn't off the charts good, but it certainly doesn't look bad at all
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If we shift up into the mid frame, you can see that it is still pretty good, not a bad
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looking result there at all. Moving on down, we can see that as we shift towards the corner, things start to soften
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And as you see towards the outer edge, it's definitely starting to fall apart as far as resolution
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Along here, we can see similar result on the bottom there. We can move up to this side, similar type result
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And then up in the upper left, we can see that it is roughly the same
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And so a fairly consistent centering performance at the least. Now here's a good f1.4 result shot off a tripod
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So it gives us a fairly scientific test. So we can see here with a real world three dimensional object, you can see that on the
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plane of focus, you know, near the center of the frame, not too bad. I mean, it's not, you know, off the charts there in terms of sharpness and contrast
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but it looks fairly good. We'd see a little bit of that fringing during the fall off, but I want to just step back
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and look at the image at a whole. You can see that it really looks beautiful
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The defocused aspect of this lens is really gorgeous. Now if we can compare f1.4 to f2 on the right, we can see that in the center of the frame
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contrast has improved nicely. Looking at this text in particular, you can see that it's just darker and inkier and just
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better defined. So contrast has really improved. That's also impacting the midframe, which is looking better
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Looking on this side, you can see the midframe is looking better. However, if we move on to f2.8, you can see looking at the lips here, comparing on the
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right, contrast has improved significantly there in the center of the midframe of the image
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And so now we're getting to the place where we're improving in the corner, but that's where the real room for improvement yet is
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And if we move on from f2.8 now on the left to f4 on the right, you see that by f4, we've
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pretty much hit a pretty optimal sharpness all across the frame. Again, to put that in context, going back to this is around f2 here, f1.8, f2, you can
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see that that's plenty of sharpness and detail to where you have just a really nice looking
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amount of contrast on the subject and then also nice fall off towards defocus
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Now by f8, you can see that it's sharp in the center, it's very sharp in the midframe
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and it's sharp right off into the corners. Everything looks really fantastic
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By f11 on the left and then the minimum aperture of f16 on the right, you'll see that f11 is
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pretty much holding its own, but by f16, diffraction is starting to soften the image
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Not so much that it's unusable, it still looks pretty decent, but you can see down here how
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much difference in contrast there is due to diffraction. So f11 still looks fantastic, f16 quite a bit softer
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Now obviously magnification level is not particularly high, but what you can see is due to that
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floating element group, we have pretty good performance up close and so at least what
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you get is very useful. And I wanted to come back to this kind of setup and so I shot another image here with
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just one subject and so it could be a nice clean shot that allows you to focus on the
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defocused area. You can just see how nice and soft, so this is on a table and so there's kitchen chairs
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that are here, but you can see how much, even in that short distance, they've all just kind
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of blurred away. So the window to the outdoors, everything is really soft and creamy, quite impressive really
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A shot like this shows good and bad in some real world use and so obviously the various
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background objects here are nicely defocused. A contrast I found was a little bit weak in this image and so that would be the weak part
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of it, but you can see that depth feels very shallow, but what's there, there is some detail
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there, but there is quite a nice drawing to the image at large
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This image shows again some of the, mostly the good, so the bad here as I would say is
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you can see that the vignette in the corners is a little bit harsh and I think I've even
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tried to take a little bit of it off there, but here in the area of focus, detail looks
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really nice, but if you look at all the defocused area and its various layers, it's really quite
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artful and it's rendering, so that part is really, really nice and I think that's going
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to please the intended audience for this particular lens. So coming back to the geometry of the bokeh for a moment and so in this series you can
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see that up near the edge of the frame there is definitely some of that lemon shape that
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is there and then that's at f1.4. Just popping in though for a moment, the bokeh circles are otherwise fairly clean, a little
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bit of that concentric circles in there, but not pronounced enough that you can really
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hardly see it. Here at f2 you can see that while we're not 100% circular right up at the edge of the
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frame, it's very, very close enough to where you're mostly going to just see circles and
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then by f2.8 because the aperture iris is so nice and round that you can see that we're
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continuing to keep a really, really circular shape. You know, this is two stops, stop down, but the circles are completely circular, no issue
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with that. I also found that the optical glass is really nice in these lenses and so colors to me looked
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really, really pleasing out of it. So you can see here that in just this little shot of a decoration that none of the colors
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are garish. Everything is really quite pleasing in this shot and that was representative of the color
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rendition in general, which I just thought was pleasing in all the images I took
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Here is an example of using it as a landscape lens and so you can see those nice levels
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of saturation and then also the contrast in the detail. When the lens is stopped down, you can see it's really delivering just really fantastic details
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The drawing from the lens is just really, really nice and I think that again, that's
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going to please the audience. Finally when it comes to flare resistance, you can see in this particular shot that very
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very bright sun outside. So there's just a little bit of ghosting artifact here
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Beyond that, however, everything looks nice and clean and there's a bit of a veiling
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You can tell that shadows have been raised somewhat, but overall the image is holding
23:17
up really well. Likewise in this shot, this is a wide open f1.4, so we're very close to clipping the
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highlights due to how bright it was for this scene, but you can see that even though this
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is kind of the worst scenario with the light source right up in the corner, that there's
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no real ghosting artifacts and just a minimal amount of veiling in that epicenter there
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Stopped down a bit, you can see, well not a bit, we're all the way to f11 for this shot
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You can see that we definitely get more of the ghosting artifacts, so that's more of
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a problem, though if you're shooting in a more typical aperture of around f5.6, it's
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not going to be this pronounced. But anyway, a little bit more flare issues when stopped down, but wide open it does really
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quite good and all throughout kind of the middle of the aperture range it does just fine
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So in general, this is a little bit more nuanced optical performance in the 28mm, but remains
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very, very nice. So you've made it to the end. Thanks for taking the time to absorb all of the research into the lens itself and as always
24:20
thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in
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