IR lens tests?

[Lee Kelly]

Has anyone of you interested in IR tested lenses for this approach?
My understanding is that different lens coatings determine which contamination makes it to your sensor and different lenses have different coatings. Some will be much better than others right? Depending on the region of the spectrum you are trying to isolate of course.
Lets talk about it.

 

[Tommaso Alvisi]

I'm very interested in this, too!

Probably for the common Canon mount lenses (L Series, or even Zeiss ZF/ZEs) we can find some info on infrared still photo forums...

 

[Lee Kelly]

There was an amazing clip uploaded on here somewhere recently called 'Wilderness' that was shot with Canon 16-35 and 70-200 Canon L glass and everything logical points to these lenses being terrible for IR but these guys knocked it out of the park as far as gorgeous images in IR goes. Not sure if they shot the shit out of it and cut around hot spots or had to really really work the images in post but it looked really nice. IR purists might not agree, and I am not experienced at all to make that call because to me it looked awesome.

Those other IR forums will likely have a list of lenses that dont work so well but there might be some surprises.

Lets get it open.

 

[Maik Müller]

I remember reading that Zeiss does specialized versions with IR-optimized coatings of their Z*-lenses, but they are only available on special request.

EDIT: Here's something on this: http://diglloyd.com/articles/Infrared/ZeissZF-prototypes-infrared.html

I have sent a mail...

 

[Ces Peynetti]

I'd love to know more about this too.

 

[Maik Müller]

I'd love to know more about this too.

I got a reply. Unfortunately Zeiss decided to stop this program and keep the remaining limited stock reserved for their current industrial machine vision clients. It looks like we are out of luck here.

Maybe someone close to Lloyd can ask him for a little test-session of this two lenses on a Dragon with IR-OLPF? It would be nice to atleast see what can be achieved with specialized lenses. A comparison to the standard-Z*-versions maybe...

Last but not least, i found a 25/2.8 ZF-IR on ebay:
http://www.ebay.de/itm/Zeiss-ZF-IR-...ransmission-/262017421435?hash=item3d0174907b

 

[Lee Kelly]

So theyre out there. That 25mm looks interesting but I have spent too much money recently on toys that I think ill be in big trouble if I spend any more!

There might even be some surprise lenses that perform really well with the correct filtration. I guess also because we have spent all that time trying to block IR with IRNDs we forget that the Epic sensor was already pretty good as 'seeing' IR and the Dragon has been improved to limit the IR pollution.