Some of you already know, I love this lens so I may have some trouble being objective about it. But I’ll try by doing some negatives first: it’s big and heavy. At nearly 5 inches long and 1.8 pounds it’s going to be the biggest prime in your bag probably. And pixel for pixel, the 35mm f2 is sharper at 2.0 than the this lens is at f/1.4. By a hair. And the Canon or Nikon 35 f1.4s certainly have as much resolution wide open, so there’s no reason to get the Zeiss 35mm f/1.4 just for wide open resolution.

After that, though, I’m all about this lens. It preserves sharpness well out to the edges with almost no distortion, very little aberration and vignetting for an f/1.4 lens. At f2.0 it’s the sharpest 35mm I’ve shot with, including the ones mentioned above. The bokeh is like butter, as nice as anything I’ve shot with and definitely better (in my opinion) than the Canon or Nikon 35 f/1.4s, but that gets subjective.

I love it. I use it constantly. But one thing I will note for anyone considering it: you need to be ready to autofocus. Focus confirmation lights are nice. But at f/1.4 they aren’t accurate. (To see for yourself use them focusing on the same object from near and from far. It will clearly be two different places that the camera claims focus confirmation.) So if you use this lens be prepared for some live-view focusing. At f/1.4 you won’t have much chance of accurate focus through the viewfinder.