First Look - Schneider Xenon FF-Prime Lenses

[Tommaso Alvisi]

s35 will never die imho

 

[Brian Merlen]

well s35 doesn't even cover my current camera at highest res is the issue, and probably won't cover my next red given the former roadmap... the canons are nice and fast, i like that...im not sure what to do. i originally wanted s4i minis but people scoffed at me saying they are too slow...i wanted to buy them coated and uncoated and convert them to uncoated (making them even slower in the process) but resulting in what i considered an interesting look. glass is a tough choice for me, not just cost wise but without knowing if red is gonna push me into full frame or not I'm not really sure what to do at this point...

 

[Phil Holland]

s35 will never die imho

Agreed.

well s35 doesn't even cover my current camera at highest res is the issue, and probably won't cover my next red given the former roadmap... the canons are nice and fast, i like that...im not sure what to do. i originally wanted s4i minis but people scoffed at me saying they are too slow...i wanted to buy them coated and uncoated and convert them to uncoated (making them even slower in the process) but resulting in what i considered an interesting look. glass is a tough choice for me, not just cost wise but without knowing if red is gonna push me into full frame or not I'm not really sure what to do at this point...

One day I will have to write a small series of books about my conversations about resolution, formats, and lenses with shooters, studios, and companies all over the world. Likely one year before I die.

Until then, I'll say a few things.

Purchasing glass is a big decision. I'm talking character of your work, budget, coverage, everything. For the severely budget minded, well your options are very limited. However, if you have two buckets of gold the sky is the limit.

Business models and ROI comes into play for all of us in reality. And that certainly helps point the needle if you aren't purchasing glass purely on the aesthetics you're after. That said, your aesthetics might be a higher priority if your work, how you work, and what you want your material to look like is the most important thing to you.

Red has developed a 6K Dragon sensor that is in between Super 35mm and VistaVision. Smack dab in the middle. Which certainly makes people scratch their heads. However, Dragon is a multi-format system and you can use that 6K resolution and format size however you'd like. Take Gone Girl for instance that extracted a 5K 2.40:1 frame from 6K 2:1. My last two shoots were 5.5K and 6K 2:1 and I used the format "fully".

For glass that covers and is designed to cover Dragon 6K FF and a bit beyond there are only a few options. Canon CN-E, Zeiss CP.2, Schneider XFF, Rokinon. There are cinema re-housings available from various places. Then you're down to still lenses. There's more glass on the way of course. However, waiting 2-3 years for something to be manufactured isn't exactly productive for things you could be shooting right now.

In terms of Dragon 6K FF there are a good amount of S35 primes that do cover much or all of the sensor with just a few focal lengths that struggle. I willingly jumped in on a set of S35 designed primes knowing that Dragon was a larger format. It made sense for me however.

As towards the future. Red's certainly pushing the format envelope, but they certainly aren't going to ignore the industry standards. There's way too much infrastructure and creative desire for the formats that we are all so familiar with.

So my best advice is plan for the future, but don't be scared of the now or what the future might hold.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Ketch, where do we get the variable ND?

Hi Matt,

This one is one of the two Prototypes I got form Schneider to test... I really love it, and the final Production unit will be even better.

I'll post news of the final Production unit when I can, unless some one else bits me to it if I am shooting and out of site...

And btw, I had promised to leave one of them to Phil, and completely bypassed me during the last days of stay in LA, and forgot to leave him on... Sorry Phil, I know you would have done a great review of it!!

 

[Fergus Hammond]

Any more news on the 25mm?

 

[Matthew J]

Any more news on the 25mm?

Heck, I am still waiting for Filmtools to get my 100mm in!

 

[Adam Johnson]

Any chance we can do another group buy?

Or does someone want to sell their set?

 

[Marcus Friedlander]

+1 for a group buy when the full 5 or 6 set comes out. As much as I love these lenses I don't want to buy an incomplete set of primes.

 

[Adam Johnson]

I'm actually ok with the current 3 lens offering, thats all I can afford right now though lol

 

[Nikhil Kamkolkar]

Does anyone think Schneider is working on a v2 of these lenses that address some of the CA noise? Is that even possible? I don't know anything about lens development, so perhaps this lies in the realm of impossibility…?

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Schneider is super busy trying to keep up with manufacturing enough lenses to feed demand, so no, at this time there is no plans for a V2 of the Xenon's, additionally working harder then ever on bringing on the full set with the quantities to deliver preordered 100 & 25 mm, and push to bring to life the production line of the 18 & 135mm as well.

 

[jacob.schwarz]

So i haven't used my set of Xenon much lately as we've been traveling but i threw them on our camera today and shot some stuff wide open to review the purple fringing and got super sad again. This i was shot with a B+W UV filter on, of course if i stop down to f4 it goes away, but this type of purple fringing is really not useable. Does any of you other Xenon owner experince this, do i have a set with bad coating? Threw my canon 16-35 on and it doesn't suffer from this.

 

[jacob.schwarz]

Also i just through on my cheap rokion lens and they flare at t1.5 but not a t2. These Xenon shouldn't flare at a t2!

 

[Steve Das]

So i haven't used my set of Xenon much lately as we've been traveling but i threw them on our camera today and shot some stuff wide open to review the purple fringing and got super sad again....

Also i just through on my cheap rokion lens and they flare at t1.5 but not a t2. These Xenon shouldn't flare at a t2!

By flare are you referring to the known purple fringing..? Or do you mean they flare in addition to the purple fringe.

 

[jacob.schwarz]

purple fringing.

 

[Jon Carr]

My 100 just shipped

 

[Owen Rennie]

Can anyone post pics of this CA I've been reading about? 90% of people here are saying these lenses are amazing then there's the 10% saying they are rubbish and unusable...

 

[Anton Shavlik]

Here's two shots I took just now on a 5d MKII with the 35mm @ T2.1 in the absolute worst possible conditions.

I cropped two of them at 1.9x which is 4k on a dragon sensor. The other is cropped at 4x which is 1080p on a dragon sensor.

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

That's horrible.

 

[Anton Shavlik]

Yep. And it's pretty consistently this bad across all three lenses I have. If it was a brighter day today I could show you much worse, but the conditions in these photos don't seem outside the bounds of normal shooting. The CA goes away around 5.6 on the 35mm and 4.0 on the 50 and 70.