OVERVIEW

The “F” in the Contax 16mm F-Distagon’s name stands for fisheye. The Contax was my first experience using a fisheye lens, so other than see pictures on the web here and there, I really did not know what to expect.

The Contax 16mm is consistent with the other better Contax C/Y lenses - solid build, well dampened and smooth focus, great sharpness and contrast, high resolving power, pleasing color and so forth. It is a Zeiss lens and the Contax 16mm lens lives up to the Zeiss reputation.

The build quality is excellent and the lens feels solid. There is a small, build-in lens hood which is really there to protect the front element from damage. Due to the extreme field of view, fish eye lenses do not have traditional lens hoods. Optically I could not find anything to complain about, so the question (at least for me) was whether or not a fisheye lens suited my style.

When this review was first written in 2007, the Contax 16mm F2.8 Distagon-F Fisheye was a rare lens. Nowadays, it is even more rare and I seldom see one in mint condition. I am not sure how one would go about scoring a lens in terms of long term collectibility, but I would expect that anybody looking at a Contax 16mm fisheye today, might have a wee bit of a collector gene in their DNA.

My Contax 16mm Fisheye was mint, and I do suffer from collector-itis from time to time - this is one lens I do miss from time to time, because I know that finding a similar copy in like condition, would be difficult at best, and the price would be steep...

LENS PERFORMANCE

Even after owning so many Contax lenses, the one aspect which really stood-out was the Contax 16mm’s resolution at F2.8 (wide open) on the Canon 1Ds Mark II. The lens was capable of out-resolving the sensor even when shot wide open. Chromatic aberrations (such as purple fringing) is well controlled; there is  some, but it is very minor and only visible when viewing the image at 50-100% in Photoshop. The CA is less than that found in the Canon 16-35mm L F2.8 (Mark I) and Canon 17-40mm L F4.0. Not meaning to minimize contrast and color, the results are consistent with other Contax Carl Zeiss lenses.

The two big surprises with the 16mm Fisheye is how neutral it can be when held even with the horizon. The fisheye effect is increasingly amplified as the lens is tilted upwards or downwards, but when held level the Contax performs surprisingly similar to a ultra wide angle (UWA) prime. There is some fisheye effect at the top & bottom, but it is very minor. This could be corrected in Photoshop, or cropped out which is most likely the case when cropping to a 4:5 aspect ratio.

Again, the other big surprise is resolution. Wide angle lenses tend to have low resolution on digital SLRs because FOV to pixel ratio is very low. Meaning, one pixel covers a large area, so such as distance leaves only have a couple pixels. The detail to pixel ratio is very low. With those pixels are already stretched to the maximum, add in the dSLR’s in-camera DSP processing along with the detail-zapping AA filter, and the resulting detail from most wide angle lenses looks ho-hum. Somehow the Contax 16mm manages to overcome those barriers and delivers an amazingly sharp, detailed image. The Contax 16mm Fisheye easily proves that Canon’s wide angle lenses come up short in the resolution department (at least the time of this article, circa 2007).