For more photos and perhaps even less nuance, hit up the video below. The text behind this review and the video is the same (or as close to the same as I could manage).

Before I went pro, I prided myself on being able to nail hyperfocal subjects at wide apertures. I also prided myself on wild-west fast manual focusing, and looking cool whilst doing so. But just hours after sweating through my first paid wedding as a second, I furiously scoured Yahoo! Auctions for a second hand 2,8 Nikon AF-S zoom lens.

Eight years have passed. I no longer work at Ados. And today I know better what sort of lens I like to use in a professional environment. I also better know how I like to shoot, paid or unpaid. Like my friend Genki, I love 50mm lenses. And, I’ve tried at least a million of them. My favourite 50 for covering all the bases: sharpness, colour, distortion, and bokeh, is the Summilux pre-ASPH. But as my young man eyes rapidly transition to old man eyes, I begin to rely on - and really to like - autofocus. The problem is that no autofocus 50mm lens I’ve used moves me. And the only 50mm that really moves me lacks motors to move it in and out of focus.

That lens is the Zeiss Planar 50/1,4.

I’ve had this bad boy since my daughter was one year old. She is now four. That means this lens has covered several events, several birthdays, travel, and fun. And gosh, what fun it both is and isn’t to shoot.

What do I mean by this? Well, in the main, I now shoot mirrorless. And, while relatively easy to manually focus with a 5DMKII, it is a beast to focus with a GFX or X-T3 or even the SL.

‘But you’ve got endless manual focus aids’, you might say. To that, I say: ‘I do, but low-sharpness lenses don’t focus as well through mirrorless cameras unless stopped down a bit’. I might also add: ‘This bad boy is also pretty low contrast’. And it is. It is also less sharp than its Nikon and Canon contemporaries.

Okay, dude, so what do you actually like about this lens?

I’m afraid that this portion of the essay will be short, which sort of ruins its thesis. But sometimes truth is discovered through antithesis. Let’s start with how smoothly it focuses, and how perfectly it pitches that focus over 200º. As a result, it is accurate, comfortable, and slow, to focus. The focus ring sits in the perfect spot, occupies the right amount of space, and is just grippy enough for any situation. And, thanks to its metal grip, it won’t dry up or grease off as many rubber grips are apt. It is also compact and easily cuppable and if you’re into video, it doesn’t breathe all that much.

But what I really, really, really like about it is the delicate out of focus fantasy world it creates every time you use its bokeh in natural or highly controlled light. The only other fast 50mm lens I’ve seen that comes close to its rendering style is the Zeiss Distagon 50/1,5 for Leica M. Highlights show soft edges, even at the corners, and when forced into cat eyes, the centres are dim by comparison, and soft. The result is an almost utopian melting pot of focus blur. Sure, some lenses blur the background more. But no 50 blurs with such gentle character.

Yes, the Planar creates pretty dark corners, but even wide open, sharpness across the frame is pretty even, even out to the corners. The problem is that even in the centre, this lens is a bit glowy wide open. It is sharp, but if you miss focus by a smallest of degrees (and thanks to low contrast, you will), everything goes soft. So rapidly does it improve when stopped down that by 2,8 or so, it is at least as sharp as its contemporaries.

The ZE version adapts to everything mirrorless, retaining full electronic control over its aperture whether your camera is a Leica SL or a Canon R or a Fujifilm X. But through an EVF using it is tiresome. That is the main reason I keep a full frame dSLR around.

Every of its focus woes and every of its mirrorless buggerisms would be fixed if Zeiss - or someone else - would motorise its focus bits for EF or FE or R or Z mounts. And doing so, they would return lens design to the days of true diversity among first-tier lenses. Today, it is all sharpness or all contrast, or both, and too little of drawing style in the figurative - drawing - sense.

Zeiss Planar 50/1,4: you slay me- or more accurately, I slay me through you. Would that you slew me through you. Autofocus for the people and all that.