Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4 vs Canon 50mm f1.4

What happens when you give a photographer the evening off, a couple cold beers and nothing on the 'to do' list?  Well he starts thinking of playing around with his gear, thats what.  Now I've said it before in this blog and I'll say it again, I'm a gear geek.  I admit it.  But this blog post isn't about getting all competitive between brands.  I use two brands of camera now (Olympus and Canon) and frankly if I had the money I'd probably own more different types than that.  Brand loyal I am not.  This blog post isn't about test charts and resolution comparisons down to the pixel level.  For that please go visit one of several dozen techie websites that I admit visiting too when I'm not allowing myself to just enjoy photography but would rather nerd out on camera stats.  

I use both these cameras a lot and for the Olympus the Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4 Summilux (gonna just call it the Leica for the rest of the blog entry) is a very well used and favourite lens.  I find the lens very sharp, even wide open, quick to focus and that it produces nice bokeh which to me means it is nice and smooth.  The Canon 50mm f1.4 was bought by me on a bit of a whim as it was on sale at London Drugs.  I don't use it that much as I really prefer my Canon 24-70 f2.8 lens, but the few times I have used it I've liked it a lot and found it to be a very sharp lens and snappy in focusing.  

In case you are curious all the photos of the camera and lenses have been taken by my Olympus 850SW waterproof point and shoot.  It was sitting there available so you'll have to forgive the quality.  

I was curious about a couple of things since I switched to a full frame camera last winter and thought it would be fun to try a little comparison done by myself, not one of the bigger camera websites.  I already of course knew the answers to all my curiosities, but sometimes it is fun to just do direct comparisons  What was I curious about?  Well:

• The Olympus is a 2X crop factor so that should make a 25mm lens about the same focal length as a 50mm on the full frame Canon.  I wanted to lock them down on a tripod and see it for myself how close it really is.  Now I know that the lenses will have different characteristics because one is truly a 50mm while one is just pretending to be.  I understand that a crop sensor doesn't magnify the image, it just uses a comparatively smaller portion of the frame giving the illusion of having zoomed in.  Having said that to 'zoom' in by cropping the Canon's 21.6 megapixels if I had used a 25mm lens I would be left with 10.8 megapixels or about the same as the Olympus for resolution.  Also in practical use when working with cameras, the crop sensor does allow you to frame things differently.  It is hard, at least for me, to shoot with a drastic crop in post processing in mind.  I prefer to get my framing right in the camera.  So the 'wide' of the full frame and the 'tele' of the crop each has distinct advantages to me which is one of the reasons I like shooting with both cameras at the same time.  I also wanted to see if there was visibly more distortion in the 25mm lens than the 50mm, as while they are both about the same focal length in practice, one of them is decidedly wider angle in build.  It might not be a good test though as the Leica is famous for lack of distortion.
• The Full Frame sensors give a shallower depth of field than the crop sensors.  I hear lots of debate about how much it makes of a difference both in techie terms and subjectively.  Well time to put up or shut up. Can the crop sensor give nice bokeh in the same situation as the full frame?  Not in actual math terms, but in real life comparisons?  I've always been happy with the out of focus areas and ability to get a shallow depth of field from the Leica lens on the Olympus, and I've occasionally been nervous about it being too shallow on the Canon.  That is one of the reasons I rarely use the 50 1.4, I sometimes like to keep my aperture higher and see my zoom's 2.8 aperture as safer lower limit.  So when push comes to shove, how does the focus fall off in a direct comparison?
• Which is sharper?  Is the Leica really as good as it's legend says? 

So here is my test technique. I'm sure that there are holes in it, feel free to poke them.  Again, this is just a general curiosity blog post, so don't take it too seriously.  

1. I used a studio strobe with a big Octabank Softbox (Alien Bee 800 if you are curious).  Why?  Just because it was already setup and ready.  I used it on two shots for each camera, f1.8 and f5.6.  The f1.4 shots were done with natural light.
2. I set each camera at ISO 100 for the studio light shots, and ISO 800 for the natural light shots.
3. I set up a tripod that each camera would use.  It was not moved at all other than to rotate slightly to make sure the centre focus point was in the middle of the centre baseball.  
4. Each camera was shot in manual mode for the studio strobe shot with settings determined by a light metre.  
5. Each camera was set on Aperture priority mode for the natural light shot at ISO 800, f1.4.
6. Auto White balance was used for both cameras
7. All images were imported to iPhoto and directly exported without any editing.
8. By mistake I had the 5D mk II on RAW and the Olympus on fine jpg.  Oops.  
9. Each camera was on centre point autofucus and focus was set on the middle of the middle baseball.  
10. I used the timer for each camera.  Image stabilization for the Olympus was turned off.
11. The baseballs and camera tripod were the same distance (not moved) for all shots.  The lighting was the same for all studio light shots and natural light shots.
12. I placed the baseballs on a bar stool about 24 inches from a book shelf.  I chose the bookshelf as I wanted a busy background that would benefit from being softened.  
13. I used three baseballs, two slightly behind the front one to show how rapidly the focus fell off.  

So how did each camera do?  Well first up I set the studio strobe on its lowest power and and metered at ISO 100, shutter speed of 1/200th (the Canon's max flash sync, the Olympus does 1/250th), and an aperture of f1.8.  Something to keep in mind is that the aspect ratios of the sensors are different so the area captured looks different, but that is simply the area the sensor captures.  Here they are (you can click on them to see the full sized image):

Canon f1.8

Leica f1.8

So the Canon has a much more obvious blur in the background and even falls off much faster on the baseballs slightly behind the front baseball.  I like the bokeh in both images, but the Canon's is of course more useful if you really want to blur that background.  Both images to me show nice consistent blurry areas which is a bit of surprise to me, I thought the Canon would be much blotchier than the Leica.  The colour looks a bit nicer to me on the Leica but the DOF of the full frame sensor is an obvious advantage in a photo like this.  Both seem sharp on the front ball, but the Canon's resolution might be playing in a bit here if you zoom right in it is tack sharp.  I'll leave the judging of vignetting or distortion to you and your opinion.

Leica f5.6

Canon f5.6

So what is an advantage for the full frame in getting a really shallow depth of field is becoming a liability at a smaller aperture like f5.6.  If you are wanting more depth of field, more things in focus as in this case at f5.6 you are going to need to close down to probably f8.0 or more to get it.  A good illustration of why occasionally you really need that high ISO capability on the 5D mk II as when you want lots of depth of field you are going to have to close down your aperture more than on the crop sensor.  

Leica f1.4, Natural Light, ISO 800

Canon f1.4, Natural Light, ISO 800

Interestingly both cameras seemed to have gotten the white balance wrong here.  The Olympus isn't quite white enough on the baseballs and the Canon is too white.  Oh well.  Both here show really nice bokeh to me.  I think it is getting a bit subjective here, but for the baseballs both show nice blur on the balls slightly back, but the Canon is much much softer on the bookshelf than the Olympus.  The question is, is the Olympus shallow enough to satisfy the objective of a photographer looking for a shallow depth of field?  To me yes, but your mileage may vary.  I like a very shallow depth of field sometimes, and for this particular shot I think the shallower the better, but I'm not sure I feel lacking in the ability of the Olympus or Leica here to muck up the background.  A quick comment about noise at ISO 800.  It looks pretty comparable to me, but remember I forgot I was shooting jpg for the Olympus so some in camera noise reduction was probably done.  My bad, oops.  

So, which one is better?  I dunno.  Judge for yourself.  It's obvious to me that:

• it's true that 25mm on the Olympus is pretty much 50mm on the Canon full frame.
• The full frame sensor does actually have a much shallower depth of field at an equal aperture.  An advantage if you want shallow depth of field, a disadvantage if you don't.  Remember, exposure is exposure.  f1.4, ISO 100 1/200th of a second is the same on both cameras. 
• both lenses are sharp and both give nice blurry areas in the frame.  

Ultimately, different tools for different uses.  This proves it again, at least to me.  And I got to play with some gear and fool around for an hour taking photos and blogging.  Now I'm going to crack my second beer and relax as tomorrow I have real work to do that involves getting real photos delivered to clients.  Photos that were taken with both cameras.  

In case you are curious, the Leica lens retails (if you can find it) for about $900 US.  It is larger and heavier than the Canon being 75x78mm and weighing 510 grams.  It has a 62mm filter size.  The Canon retails for about $360 US.  It 51x74mm and weighs 290 grams.  I love my Leica, but the weight, size and price are a huge advantage to the Canon.  The Leica comes with a lens bag and lens hood, the Canon does not so figure that in on the price if it matters to you (I bought my lens hood for the Canon on ebay after I found out they wanted about $80 for the real one from Canon).

Looking for a good and thorough not by the seat of your pants review of the Panasonic Leica 25mm f1.4 lens?  Look here.  Want a review of the Canon 50mm f1.4?  Try here.

Sorry about the weird formatting and box around some text in this post.  Blogspot was acting weird on me and I don't really feel like digging into why.  

Thanks for dropping by my little blog.  If you like it, please link to it on Facebook by using the little widget on the right hand side of the blog, or any other social networking site by using the links on the bottom of the blog.  Comments are always welcome.  

As a side note, I learned something new about the E3 today.  When you push the IS button (image stabilization) it tells you on the bottom of the screen what the effective focal length of your current lens is.  For example it says '50mm' when the Leica is on there.  I suppose it is on this screen to help you decide what speed you can handhold at if you turn IS off.  Weird I've been using the camera for about two years and never noticed it.  And I thought I knew the camera like the back of my hand!  I had to go through the camera and set everything back up as Olympus turned everything back to factory settings when they had it in for repair, thats when I noticed it.  So morale of the story?  Be more observant than I am.  :)