Review on 📷 Voigtlaender Nokton Classic Lens 40mm/F1.4 by Jennifer Scott

I bought a brand new MC version of this lens for my Sony A7R last year on a trip to the Oregon Coast. I planned to use it for street photography in quaint seaside towns as well as nature photography. I loved how good this lens looks and feels and how well it matches the A7R. Very unobtrusive, it didn't get in my way and felt very natural despite not being a Leica user. But when I looked at the first pictures, my excitement turned to disappointment. The lens is relatively sharp in the center of the image, rather blurred in the center of the image, and then somewhat sharper in the corners and at the edges, but never as sharp as in the center of the image. At F1.4 there is a lot of flare and vignetting, which is reduced to an acceptable level at F5.6. In order for the lens to maintain acceptable sharpness throughout the frame, it must be stopped before F11.0. While I half-expected the corners to be blurry, the blurring in the center of the image surprised me. Even at F11.0 there are clear color fringes at the corners and edges of the frame. However, this is easily fixed in post-processing, so I don't consider this a major flaw. I compared this lens head-to-head with my 50 year old $50 Konica 40mm F1.8 lens and you know what – the good old single coated Konica performed better than this lens. It has better color rendition and contrast (it doesn't have as much contrast as this lens, probably because of the single layer coating, which I think is a good thing as I find low contrast easier to deal with in post than too high contrast) and it's sharper than this lens at all f-stops, with the exception of F11.0, where both lenses predictably perform the same (although the Konica is a bit sharper there, pixel-wise). The Konica has less fringing than this lens and can also be easily removed in post-processing. I had no intention of giving up this lens just yet, so I repeated the test with other adapters and then bought another copy of this lens from someone else. dealer and repeat the test. The results were the same every time. After that I returned both copies of this lens and continue to use my Konika. While this lens is very well made, I can't justify paying over $400 for subpar optical performance. But please don't let this rating discourage you from buying this lens - you might like its unusual features.