Portrait time: Sample gallery from Sony's new 85mm F1.4 GM lens

I see no one commenting about the sharpness @f/1.4.
It's incredible! My 85/1.8 (Nikkor AF) is nowhere this sharp at full aperture!
But then again, I paid a few hundred euros for it...

Hot damn! If you can't tell how incredible that lens is than you don't know what you're looking for, and you sure as hell don't need a $1800 lens.

The shots are real good.

Unfortunately many characteristics of this lens remain undiscovered due to the displayed images...

The lens surely will be great given the team behind its development - still those images are more common to iphone photography for instagram.

The choice of subject distance in most of the shots is unusual for a 85 mm lens, even on 1.5x crop.

Sry, IMO none of the images here shows what this lens is capable of. But this one does:
http://i0.wp.com/www.stevehuffphoto.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/8509.jpg

Is there a filter to screen out the hipster models?

Id like to see the 85mm compared with the 90mm f/2.8 and of course the 85mm batis, can't wait

The Sony "digital" look. The new "filter" button to come.

@ all the dudes here complaining about sample pictures being "uninspired" or in whatever else way "not good enough" to their standards:
.
Apparently, you guys forget that this was NOT a professional fashion shooting, where ONE photographer was shooting ONE model thousands of times over several hours, just to pick the best 5 pictures from perhaps 500+. Not to mention lack of control over lighting, model acting/posing etc.
Moreover, you guys conveniently forget that the reviewers here were given equipment they never before had in their hands (entirely new lenses and to some of them possibly even the cameras) without any chance to get accustomed to the new tech. Tell me ONE professional photographer who gets entirely NEW gear, gets out, takes 20 shots and all them are masterpieces? In what delusional world are you living, or are you just hating for no reason?

And I always thought that fanboy-ism was constrained to the guys < 16 years of age.....

So I saw that boxing picture and was like, HA! That Barry guy is boxing. And then I looked at 100% and I am pretty sure that's not Barry. But a scary, criminal version of Barry.

I think people are being harsh on the images - it's good of the DPR staff to take some photos when they had they brief opportunity to do so with the lens.

I think a fair point though, is that I've very seldom seen anything on this site that could not be achieved by a competent photographer with gear from 2007 or earlier.

That's not really a criticism of the photography here - more a comment that I think we overemphasize the importance of the latest thing. That makes sense with a preview / review site, but it makes a nonsense really of the endless brand, format, megapixel, DR debates. Features are important and sometimes they'll enable you to get a key shot, however they're a means to an end not the end.

Why don't you simply say that these sample photos weren't taken by DPR? Same ones are shown at Cameralabs site..

Colors are awful in these sample images. I guess that has nothing to do with the lens but still. Ugly. The lens however seems to have very nice bokeh and is sharp. Very promising.

I'm more interested to see shot with the A7 and this glass, a Batis, a Sigma and a Canon shooting the same scenes in daylight. Personally, I really do not like the bokeh on the last shot and the last shot of the singer. It has the look of too much of a photoshop filter. Or a lens baby product.

Dpreview should hire the photographer of at least good quality. These test shots are a total misrepresentation of this lens of what this lens is capable of.

All those punchy colors on set should be hard for any camera to handle when it comes to color saturation (shooting jpeg) and auto wb.

I dont own shares in Canon Nikon or Sony and probably neither do you. If you have not done so already do your self a favour, go and try the Canon 85mm f/1.2l mk2 on a 6D or any modern camera. Set it to 1.2 take a few photos.

Or a full frame Nikon and their 85mm 1.4d or g.

Dxo Bark and Dippy review are not known for their photographic talent. They measure scores but have no idea how to translate this to real world photography, or how this relates to human perception or vision.

If you have ever used a long lens on a small camera body you will know how hard that is. So ensure your camera can balance the lenses you hope to buy.

I hope one day Sony will produce great cameras but they are not there yet. The human eye can only see about 10-11 stops of dynamic range under quick scanning conditions your screen or printing even less.

Few people can agree on how to measure dynamic range or how Iso can be compared evenly across all cameras.
Or even how raw converters can be compared.

Hold your thumb at arms length the size of the thumb nail is the area that the human eye can see in focus at one time.

Forget hype try everything for real and choose what works.

Just can't get along with Sony colors as they seem to have the worst asian skin tones of any brand, and my family has asian skin. Guess that makes my buying decisions racist.

Technically however everything looks great (i.e. sensor, lens sharpness, no camera shakes, etc).

Image number 2.

The Boxer on the left with the gray tank and white gloves...
His glove lowest to the frame and in the background. There is Green Axial-CA. And in the glove of the blue tank boxer in the foreground has Magenta Axial- CA. Its not overly strong but its definitely there.

This is the bane of my work. I often shoot wide open and Axial-CA is very hard to correct without damaging the entire image especially if any part of my image has similar colors throughout that are not CA. This is why I shoot with Zeiss, its one of the best brands in the world when focusing on resolution and CA correction.

Thankfully my Canon camera does not have a Sony tweaked Sony Sensor they seemed to be tweaked to score well at DXO mark and not for real world photography.

Colour and tonality looks worse than an i phone.

The Technical quality of the bokeh from the samples appearing everywhere is the worst i have ever seen. Like wearing the wrong glasses it makes you feel sick.

Color sucks.

Sorry to say, but the rendering of skin in these portraits is very waxy. But I'm seeing the same thing in photos from the press event taken by other people using the 85mm, and with the other two newly-announced lenses.

The low ISO shots (like shot #1) look almost identical to the high[er] ISO shots (like shot #8)--like noise-reduction has flattened the tonality. I'm guessing that the cause of that waxiness has something to do with the quality the A7R II's jpegs. I would hate to find out that the waxy look is attributable to the way these G-Master lenses render.

This gallery shows how an excellent camera and superb lens are useless without a photographer.

wow!!! Armchair experts are really difficult to please

TL/DR: I presume the trolls have rubbished the lens and/or samples while a few have declared the arrival of the 85mm messiah.

It goes to show that after spending $1800 on this really large lens, most people will still get mediocre pictures like these.
I am sure you reading this will get stellar award winning pictures though. :D

The poor guy in the last pic seems to suffer from yellow fever...

All over, WB is not a priority, obviously. (Of course my screen could be totally off...)

These images will hardly sell that lens :D

I don't know why all those negative comments about the pictures. This lens looks nice and very sharp to me.
The rest is pure gear and over the top technical snobism :)

Very unimpressive images.

Wow!!! Just googled canon 85mm 1.2 and those images look 50x nicer than this crap (not this len's fault)

There isn't a single example that shows the edge sharpness of the lens.

Very unimpressive photos here are probably doing a poor representation of what this lens might be capable of.

Going by these samples alone, there's hardly a reason to buy this over the Batis.

For spontaneous portraits in low light they are a little bit cinematic and not bad at all.

Wow. That is really a nice lens. The bokeh look solid A quality and what's in focus wide open is crisp at 42MP, apparently even way off axis. Hate to say it, but this might actually be well worth its price... and that's not something I'd normally say about a lens in this price class. Sony hasn't done well in making cheap E-mount glass, but they certainly have been making sure that their high-end glass delivers.

Honestly somethings it is better not to rush and post
Just to be first.

I don't know if that represents what this lens is capable of but
Those photos made me stop thinking how I sell my batis 85mm and get it.

I am impressed. I guess those are OOC jpegs, I would compress the highlights in some of them; compose one or two slightly differently (the head not so close to the center in #5 and #8) but overall, very pleasant images both technically and artistically. #9 and #11 (the latter needs some work on the highlights) are the best, IMO.

CA looks very well controlled in #9, for example, where the harsh lighting could be easily a problem with a fast lens. Transitions from focus to OOF look very smooth.

Those are not great portraits, kinda uninspired. But that wasn't the point. The lens is sharp and has pretty smooth bokeh - which is what you want from a lens.