A few months back, feeling quasi-suicidal, I decided to do a comparison of different cinema lens sets. Having run out of luck around the time I was born, I chose one of the busiest weeks of the year to do it, so most of the newer, more expensive glass was unavailable, but thankfully some of the older and in my opinion more interesting sets were at my disposal .
Lens sets used:
Bausch & Lomb Super Baltar
Canon CN-E
Canon K35
Cooke S4 mini
Cooke S4 mini with uncoated front element
Cooke Speed Panchro
Sigma Cine
Schneider Cine Xenar
Zeiss CP3
Zeiss Standard Speed
Zeiss Super Speed
Shot on a Red Dragon at 1280 ISO, 3200k, no corrections in post.
The scene was lit with a set of Kino Diva-Lite LEDs. 2x 650w fresnels were used in order to test flare and glare characteristics.
Half of the sets were PL mount, the other half Canon EF. PLs were shot first from tele to wide, then EF in reverse, therefore framing and camera position is not identical across the sets and any field of view comparison between them is impossible.
All videos on this page were shot at T2.8. A second round of videos will be posted later, with lenses set both wide open and at T2.8.
This test would not have happened without the help of the following people:
Myrto Tricheili, Chris Scott, Alexandros Papathanasopoulos, Nefeli Dakozoudi, Eleni Lola, Aegle Drakou, Leonidas Germanopoulos, Michalis Gatzogias, Olympia Mitilinaiou, Fotis Mitsis, Odisseas Pavlopoulos and all members of GSC who passed by.
The lenses were provided by the following companies:
Camera and lights were provided by DK Rental House
First video is a comparison between 50mm lenses from all sets, followed by separate videos of each set.