35mm Shootout! Episode 4: Bokeh Quality

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to do the fourth and final of the episodes on the 35mm
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shootout. Previous to this, in our episode one, we've taken a look at the flare resistance of
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each one of these lenses. In our second episode, we took a look at the resolution and overall image
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quality. In the third edition, we took a look at the autofocus, its accuracy and consistency
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And then finally here, as we look at bokeh quality, understand that bokeh is a kind of a
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difficult metric to measure because it really comes down to something very subjective. For example
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This is one of my favorite vintage lenses right here. It's an old Soviet era 58mm f2 lens, the Helios 44-2 lens
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Truth be told, it's got a lot of optical flaws wide open
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but the end result, of course, is something that I and many others find beautiful and distinctive, artistic
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but really it boils down to flaws. And so the truth of the matter is that it can be somewhat hard to actually chart bokeh performance
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And sometimes if you get a little too close in looking at the detail of bokeh, you kind of lose sight of the big picture
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And it's really in the big picture that a lens's bokeh quality demonstrates itself in that overall drawing and look
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And that can be kind of hard to quantify. That being said, we're going to do a couple of things here to help to measure each one of these lenses and their performance
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The first of those is that we're going to do a controlled test that takes a look at how they render out-of-focus or specular highlights
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In this case, we're going to have a foreground subject and then have as background lights a Christmas tree
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I shot this test a few weeks ago over the Christmas season
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It gives us a couple of ideas as we look at that. It shows us the shape of the bokeh circles across the frame
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It shows us how busy those can be and whether or not they have the concentric circles inside
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sometimes referred to as onion bokeh, or just kind of a busy quality or hard edges, double lines
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various things that will show up in that kind of test. That being said, one of the most beautifully bokeh producing lenses that I've used
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the Otis 55mm f1.4 from Zeiss, in that kind of test, it shows a fair number of concentric circles or onion bokeh
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And so I use that anecdote to say that it really is not the final ysis on that
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And so to kind of augment that, I'll also just throw in some galleries at the end of some real world images
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And taken with each one of these lenses, because I think at the end of the day
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the best way to determine the quality of bokeh from any lens is to look at what it produces or can produce in a variety of situations
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To me, one of the most important aspects of bokeh quality is that transition from your plane of focus to the defocused region
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And if that happens very smoothly and you have a very sharp plane of focus and then you melt away to your out of focus region
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that produces images that are beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. And it's one of the things that I look at the most when determining bokeh quality
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And so, without any further ado, let's jump into the test and take a look at this
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and then we'll come back and give a wrap-up at the end. Okay, so we're going to start off by taking a look at the 35mm F1.4 L Mark II
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So we'll just run through each one of these and take a look here
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All right, and so as you can see, overall, the shape of the circles towards the center is nice and round
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As you see, as we head towards the edge of the frame, we get a little bit more lemon shape
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and that's pretty common for lenses like this. And so as we take a closer look at the signature here
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it's easiest to see in some of these lighter ones. We see that overall these are very, very nice and smooth
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There's not really any hard edges, and while there is some very light concentric circles here
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overall this is very nicely shaped and some of the better ones that I seen in this particular test Now as we go down to F2 here we see that the story is fairly similar
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F2 does help, although obviously as the aperture closes down, the size of these begins to diminish
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But we see that it does help to correct the kind of lemon shape towards the edges
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And so if that's a concern for you, you might want to take a look at just stopping down a little bit
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to give you that more uniform look across the frame. Now as we take a closer look we see now that there is a little bit more of an inner circle
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that's showing up, inner edge on these and those concentric circles are a little bit
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more defined. On top of that I am surprised to see that even at F2 there is a little bit of the aperture
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blade shape that's starting to show and we'll find as we step on down to F2.8 that that
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becomes a little bit more pronounced and you can see the shape of the nine aperture blade
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starting to come on board here. Here at f2.8 the story is pretty similar that inner edge is a little
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bit more visible here. Now we go on down to f4 and here we see that you can really start to really
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see that it's called a nonagonal shape of the nine aperture blades that are showing. Then finally at
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f5.6 that's a little bit more pronounced and we get a little bit more of a light bleed here in a
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of these but overall even still here we see that this is still a nice performance and while there
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is that inner line it's not overly pronounced and so as we step back and look at the overall global
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look it really is quite nice overall okay now let's take a look at the sigma here and so we're
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going to pop in and take a look at these and so this is starting again at f1.4 and similarly to
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that of the cannon we see that nice and round in the middle a little lemon shape towards edges as
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we take a closer look we see that while there are less of the concentric circles there's just a little
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bit more of a busyness inside some of these brighter ones here that you can see just showing
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up there the inner circle here is not harsh and so there's not a big issue with that either as we
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move on now to f2 we find similarly to a somewhat less degree but similarly the roundness of these
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is actually improved towards the edges stopped out at F2. Now, we see here also that one area that the Sigma is doing a little bit better than the Canon
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is that the roundness, the shape of the aperture blades is still less pronounced at this point
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We'd say mostly that that business that was there at F1.4 is just magnified a little bit here
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And you can also start to see that inner line start to emerge a little bit here
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at f2.8 we now begin to see just a little bit of the shape of the aperture blades but i would say
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that it's probably a stop behind what the canon is showing in that regard but overall if you're
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looking at the hole they still look quite round there's nothing that's displeasing about them
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and once again just that overall busyness and the inner circle is becoming a little bit more defined
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and we see that there's a little bit more of a light bleeding around some of these lighter ones
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and now of course you're starting to see strongly the shape of those blades this is at f4 but again
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overall the look is not bad here and then at f5.6 I would say overall the look is not quite as good
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as that of the Canon but at the same time it's they're not highly dissimilar in fact it's
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interesting to take a look when we compare side by side that of the Canon and the Sigma we'll zoom
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on into that image and compare these side by side. And so as you can see here, they really have quite
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a similar look. The cannons are a little bit softer, wide open. The Sigma has just a little bit more
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busyness inside of there. And as we move off towards the edge, they're quite similar in the
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sense that of the lemon shape, it's just a slight bit more pronounced here with the Sigma. You see
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particularly here towards this edge, that gradation towards the more lemon shape happens a little bit
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more quickly with the Sigma. Even this is losing its roundness while this is still nice and round
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on the Canon and so on in this area here too as well. Now we have the Canon on the left and the
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Sigma on the right. This is at F2 and we can see here that really the overall look is probably even
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a bit more similar in some ways The concentric circles are showing up some there on the Canon but over here we see a little bit more busyness in the Sigma performance And out towards the edge the Canon is keeping a little bit more round The Sigma is still a little
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bit more oval in shape. And between the two, I would say that the inner circle
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this line around the inner of each one of these is roughly similar
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okay now let's take a look at the canon 35 millimeter f2 is we'll jump in now of course the
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canon doesn't have quite as wide an aperture so it stops a full stop behind that of the canon and
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the sigma f1.4 lenses but we're going to see here that overall the canon does a nice job
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i would say that the concentric circles are a little bit more defined here compared to that of
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the 35mm f1.4 M1.4 LIS Mark II. Overall, however, it's not quite as strongly lemon-shaped towards
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the edges either. That inner circle is there, but it's not harsh here. I found in real life
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experience that this lens does produce very nice bokeh quality. Now, we look at it at f2.8
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and we can see that once again it has a kind of a similar effect of keeping things more round out
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towards the edge of the frame. The cannon here has eight blades rather than nine like the others
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and so we're starting to see just a hint of the blade shape, but overall the performance here is
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roughly similar. Nothing's getting ugly here. We see now surprisingly that stop down to f4
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that really the overall roundness of the cannons, the 35IS I should say, we see that the overall
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circular shape is actually better here than what it is with either of the F1.4 options
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and that's true even here at F5.6, and so it does a better job overall, I would say, of keeping
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the overall shape of the aperture blades nice and round, and so this really is a nice performance
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overall, even though, as you can see, it doesn't produce quite as much bokeh because of the smaller
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aperture. Let's compare the 35 F2 IS here on the left with the 35 F1.4 L Mark II here on the right
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And so these are both at F2. So I want you to note a couple of things. One thing that's interesting
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to me is although that the distance is similar away as far as the sensor goes, because the 35
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f1.4 l mark ii is a longer lens it means that its elements are closer and so it actually produces a
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little bit more larger bokeh circles here and so that's something that i found interesting even
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though they're at the same aperture so as we compare these side by side you can see that
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the there's a little bit more busyness in the f2 is compared to the f1.4 l mark ii and so i thought i
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could see that also in our test where we looked at resolution in episode two that just the out
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of focus was a little bit smoother on the f1.4 l mark ii and we see also here now because the canon
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f1.4 has the advantage of being stopped down a bit that it is has more circular shape towards
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the edges of the frame overall the fact that it shows a better performance here in my estimation
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is a big deal because this 35 IS has had some of the best overall bokeh quality of any of the 35
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millimeter lenses prior to this. Our final competitor here is the Tamron 45 millimeter
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f1.4. So as we could see in some of our previous tests, that 10 millimeters makes a bigger difference
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than what you might think in terms of its magnification of the subject. And so as we can
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see as we zoom in here, this is going to produce the biggest Boka circles and of course the
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frame is much less in the frame by comparison because this was set up at the same distance
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So number one you can see that there is more busyness within these Boka circles than with
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any of the other competitors to this point. Towards the very edge of the frame we see
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some of those lemon shapes that are starting to manifest themselves. Overall however, one
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One thing that really does stand out here is how nice and smooth the transition here That inner circle is really not very defined As we stop down down to f2 we see that once again the same remains true and that the reason why in most real life situations this
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lens actually has very beautiful bokeh and you can see also it has a tremendous amount of resolution
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here on the actual subject stopping down to f2.8 we see that now the circular highlights are
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they're nice and round all across the frame that busyness becomes a little bit more pronounced let's
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Let's just step back for a moment and you can see that it is visible even without going into a pixel level here
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That being said, we still see that that inner line is still very undefined and so nice and smooth in its transition
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That inner line is starting to show up a little bit more here now at F4
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but we also see that the circular shape is still quite good all across the frame for the Tamron
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although there is still that overall busyness in the Boca circles that I'm not fond of
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At f5.6, once again, although this also has a nine-bladed aperture, it's doing a better job of disguising the shape of those aperture blades when we compare it to some of the other competitors
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And so as we look through the data that we collected, we find that each one of these lenses has a slightly distinctive quality when it comes to its bokeh signature
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The Canon 35mm f1.4L Mark II really has what I would say is the nicest bokeh of the bunch overall
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It is very, very smooth in its transition from a sharp plane of focus to its defocused region
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And we could see by looking at the highlights that there really is very little to criticize
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There is a very, very slight bit of concentric circles inside. And as we stopped it down, the only real objection is that it, of all the lenses
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showed the shape of its aperture blades the most. But as this series of real-world images shows, it produces very lovely bokeh all around
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the Sigma 35mm f1.4 it did quite well in this test as well it was a little bit busier than the
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Canon 35mm f1.4 in the activity within the bokeh circles and as we could see it also was more likely
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to deform them towards the lemon shape towards the edges of the frame in real world use the Sigma
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has good, if not exceptional, bokeh. And I would say that compared to the Canon, it just really
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isn't quite as smooth in that transition zone going from focus to defocus. But at the end of
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the day, I doubt that you'll find too much objectionable about its bokeh quality either
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The Canon 35mm F2IS, it has shown itself to be quite good in this area in real world use
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In our test, we saw that it had just a slight bit more activity than the f1.4 lenses inside the bokeh circle, or at least compared to the 35L Mark II
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But it also did a better job of retaining a circular aperture shape as it was stopped down
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And so overall, this is a nice performance as the real-world results show
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the Tamron in a sense reminded me a bit of the Zeiss Otis and that it showed a little bit more
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of the concentric circles and of course the fact that it's bokeh is the most pronounced in this
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test it means that there is a they're more magnified and there's a little bit more to
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criticize as you look at but although there is some busyness and some concentric circles in the
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frames one thing that I certainly noticed is that that inner line is not pronounced at all and so
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there is a nice fall off and that shows off in real world use. The Tamron also did a good job
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of retaining a circular shape of its aperture even when it was stopped down. Overall, all of these
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lenses are capable of producing some nice real world bokeh, but perhaps as you compare them side
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by side, there is one lens that has caught your eye that you like a little bit more than the others
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And I hope that that helps just one more metric to be able to evaluate which one of these lenses
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is the best option for you. I'm Dustin Abbott, and I hope that you've enjoyed
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this 35mm shootout series. Down below, I'm throwing links to the reviews for each one of these lenses
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and I have both a text and a video review for each one of them. If you haven't already, please subscribe
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Have a great day

35mm Shootout! Episode 4: Bokeh Quality

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35mm Shootout! Episode 4: Bokeh Quality

Dustin Abbott