Today, I received my new Carl Zeiss Biogon T* 28/2.8 ZM, which I decided to get after I realised how much I liked the ZM line’s rendering on the M8. So I sold my 28/1.9 Ultron, which I had only bought a couple months ago, but with which I never really got friends completely.

After pickung up the Biogon from the post office, I put in on my M8 immediately and started taking a couple of test frames. Initially, I was a bit disappointed as the colour rendering was not how I remembered it from my 35/2 Biogon, but then I realised that was because the UV/IR filter was lacking and it was harsh mid-day light … So when I got back home, I attached the 46mm filter I still had from the Ultron and — there it was, the famous Zeiss rendering with bold colours, strong contrast and the so-called “3D-pop”.

Granted, a 28mm f/2.8 lens has a considerably larger depth-of-field than a 35mm f/2 lens, thus exhibiting less background blurring and less subject separation. Still, the 28 Biogon shows the same rendering as the other lenses in the Zeiss ZM lineup — to a certain degree.

To illustrate what I am talking about, here are two frames I snapped this afternoon before heading off to work:

So far, I am very pleased with how this lens renders, and it’s exactly the same way (albeit with a shorter focal length and slower aperture) as my old 35/2 Biogon which, in retrospective, I loved very much. We’ll see how I get along with the one stop slower aperture compared to the 28/1.9 Ultron, but I think the gain in image quality more than makes good for the lack of speed.