Zeiss Milvus 50 F1.4 Lens review by a portrait photographer

Zeiss Milvus is the most recent photography lenses that Zeiss released. Some people said Milvus has 99% optical quality of Otus with less than half of the price. I agree. I used both Otus and Milvus. Comparing Milvus 50 with Otus 55 I don’t see any difference. Even the difference on focal length feels very minimal.

Made and handling

Like all Zeiss lenses. Milvus 50 is very well made. Beautiful design and very smooth focusing ring. It’s not the lightest 50mm lens I ever used but definitely lighter than most of modern the 50 F1.4 lenses. The lens is balanced really well with my Leica SL2-S. I believe it’ll be the case for most of the mirrorless cameras. Mine is ZE version, I use a Sigma MC-21 converter to adapt to the camera and it works fine. There are other dummy adaptors available. They works well and much cheaper just lack of aperture control. ZF version has the aperture ring but on the Nikon version the focusing ring is turning in the opposite direction and that bugs me a lot. I also like the look of ZE version. The design is more clean and looks almost like a L mount lens.

Image quality

Again, I’m not gonna talk about technical details here. I personally don’t think they are the major deciding factors when choosing a lens. There are many things that can not be measured. Zeiss Milvus 50 F1.4 is not the sharpnest lens. It’s between Zeiss Sonnar 50 F1.5 and Panasonic Lumix S Pro 50 F1.4. It has the same modern lens rendering without overkilling the sharpness. Corner sharpness is great, chromatic aberration is well controlled. For me it’s the ideal portrait lens unless you want that vintage look. For that you should pick Sonnar.

From let to right. Zeiss Sonnar 50 F1.5, Zeiss Milvus 50 F1.4, Panasonic Lumix S Pro 50 F1.4

50mm lens is my favourite focal length for portrait. The look is close to human eye, so the image created with 50mm lenses looks very natural. The F1.4 aperture also doesn’t a great job putting your subject in the main focus without completely blurred the background. So your subject and your background can complement each other. It produce very pleasing result not matter it’s a close up portrait or full length. I think the next closest one will be 35mm. Over 95% of the portrait that I shoot are done with either 35mm or 50mm lenses.

The colour of of most to the Zeiss lenses are bit cooler comparing with Nikon and Panasonic and Sigma. The the only exceptions are Otus. The Otus 55 F1.4 that I used renders slightly warmer than Milvus. I might be wrong, because I never done a side by side compare (too bad I can’t keep the Otus that Zeiss sent me for testing). I found the slightly cooler colour has at least one benefit, first it really makes the compliment colour effect more obvious. I did a night shoot with Milvus 50. I was quick happy about how the cool shadow complete the warm highlight.

Zeiss Milvus has great corner sharpness, this is something that Sonnar suffers a lot. It also has clean background blur. It doesn’t have any swirl and semi swirl effect that are quite common among vintage lenses. For this there is no right or wrong. It all depends on what effect you want. Zeiss Milvus can’t create that vintage/classic look that Sonnar is so good at. What it really good at is that modern but not over processed look(too sharp, too crisp). Don’t get me wrong, this lens is sharp. But it’s not overly sharp which will have a negative effect on portrait work. For modern look portrait work, this is probably the only lens that you’ll need.

Check out my Portrait Photography Page to see more of my portrait work.

Also, check out my Portrait Lighting Online course.