Voigtlander Nokton 50 mm f/1.2 Aspherical review - Chromatic and spherical aberration

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Voigtlander Nokton 50 mm f/1.2 Aspherical

5 May 2020

Maciej Latałło

5. Chromatic and spherical aberration

Chromatic aberration

Usually we write here about colouring in blurry, out-of-focus areas positioned further in the frame but in this case you don't have to look for blur far away because it is everywhere. Fortunately there is no colouring visible so we can say the Voigtlander 1.2/50 doesn't have problems with longitudinal chromatic aberration.

Voigtlander Nokton 50 mm f/1.2 Aspherical - Chromatic and spherical aberration

What about the lateral variation of that aberration? The graph below shows its performance depending on aperture values for both types of detectors.

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Here the tested lens should be praised a lot. Abberation doesn't depend on aperture value practically anywhere and it keeps a negligible level of 0.01-0.02% for both types of detectors. The chances that you might find it bothersome in real life photos are non-existent.

A7R II, RAW, f/1.2	A7R II, RAW, f/16.0

Spherical aberration

First photos, presented in this chapter, don't featuer any focus shift effect. Still, to be honest, with such a fuzzy image it is really difficult to say where the focusing range is and how it shifts, if it shifts at all, after changing the aperture value.

Spherical aberration cannot be corrected in a perfect way because defocused circles of light differ a bit. The one we got before the focal point features a bit of soft edge and the one after the focus has a lighter rim. Still it must be admitted that, for such a fast lens, the differences observed in the circles are quite subtle and don't allow us to criticize the tested lens's correction of spherical aberration in an especially harsh way.