Last Updated on 03/09/2019 by Mark Beckenbach
We were shooting with the Panasonic 50mm f1.4 Lumix S Pro at WPPI 2019 and we’ve got a ton of portrait sample photos.
The Panasonic 50mm f1.4 Lumix S Pro lens is the company’s first really high end prime lens offering for the L mount system. We recently put it through a quick test for portrait shooting. Photographers who are interested in shooting portraits with a shorter focal length like a 50mm lens will be pleasantly surprised that Panasonic put a lot of engineering into this lens. In fact, during our meeting with Panasonic they told us that they made it a “no compromise” lens. It was likened at one point to the Zeiss Otus lineup, which lead the way for the charts over at DXOMark. We’ve updated our Panasonic 50mm f1.4 Lumix S Pro first impressions for you, but we’ve got a few further thoughts and the full gallery of portraits after the jump.
During the few hours we had with the new Panasonic 50mm f1.4 lens, we found there to be a few misfocusing issues on the Panasonic S1. To be fair, we were working with a shoot-ready, pre-production model and the autofocus may not be fully tuned for production yet. Panasonic’s autofocus with the G series cameras has always been solid, but that is Micro Four Thirds. This is L mount and the target customers for this camera should expect nothing but the best with Leica, Sigma, and Panasonic all working on products.
It’s going to be quite interesting though: Panasonic has a 50mm f1.4 Lumix S Pro lens quite obviously. But Leica has their own Summilux 50mm f1.4 for L mount and Sigma revamped their 50mm f1.4 Art lens for the mount. The latter has won many awards and is considered to be one of the company’s sharpest lenses. I guess we’re going to need to see how the differences play out.
