Red pro zoom 18-85 questions?

[Dan Kanes]

Hi!

Id love to hear from some red pro Zoom 18-85 owners:

1. General impressions of the lens?
2. How well has it held up through professional use?
3. Where did you get your lens supports?
4. Do you find it to be your workhorse lens?

Thanks!

[Parker Powers]

bump

[Mike P.]

I would like to know as well. Can't beat ~$6k for a lens that covers 18-85. Does the weight/size make it less than ideal in real world use?

[Domenic Barbero]

Im also contemplating this as well. Would love to know how it stacks up. Ive read some good reviews of it.

[Rolf Kestermann]

Just bought it last week after some hesitation. There seems to be always one more battle tested unit available, mine was brand new or appeared that way.
Assuming all units are like that, they are a great deal, but ( isn't there always a but) they are not perfect. Referring to Your questions, first impression is that it is big,
not really a problem by itself, but there could be issues with matte boxes, filtration, follow focus and actually mounting it on other cameras. If You buy the accessories
after the lens, and of course use it with a RED there is no issue at all. How well it holds up depends on care, one thing looking week is the actual PL mount, yet not enough time spend with it to tell. Mechanically there is the tiniest of Backlash on the focus, but the spread on the marks are huge, most Follow focus units by themselves are worse. The zoom ring is not too stiff but has no really oily smoothness to move from still to a slow creep by hand, will need a zoom crontrol with a high torque motor to do that. Optically it is better on the long end than on the short. There is a slight softening which is not visible staying in HD, but spreading the image across two monitors evaluating it at quad HD may show it off. The worst quality however is the CA at 18mm which disappears by 32mm. The good thing is that it is consistent and easy to deal with in post. In many other aspects the lens is really nice, geometry is straight around 25mm, but it never goes overboard with distortion from barrel to pincushion. Flares and fogging are minimal and contrast is nice for a big lens. Focuses close, doesn't breathe,covers 5kWS from 19mm and it weighs the same as its peers. For projects which are finished in HD, it is a great lens, if the finish is in 4K it may need a little help in post when using shots of the shorter focal length.

[Christopher Mills]

RE: size and Weight.. you really should use a baseplate, rods and a support bracket to not deform the mounting interface, and to preserve the focal plane alignment.
Don't think this is a handheld rig...
also, not sure of 5K coverage at the wide side...
it is well thought of in terms of sharpness compared to Cooke 20-100

[Dan Kanes]

I think one thing I noticed with the one I tried was that the focus didn't track super well through the zoom range - maybe that's why it was battle tested. Could be something fixable with shimming?

That might be the softness at the wide side you notice.

[Rolf Kestermann]

I probably I gave the wrong impression, it is a sharp lens even full wide, lets just say it gets outrageously good at 85mm.

[Rolf Kestermann]

I looked at the lens a little more closely over the last couple of weeks and thought to share my observation. First off, for the money, it is a steal, but (there always is)watch out for expensive accessories. I found a great little support at Cord vision for $70. Its not a ring support, just a little shelf, but very nice. The clip on Matte box by Red vignettes at 5k, but I think any 2-stage 4X5 filter size Matte box will. Now optically I looked a little more into the chromatic aberrations which occur in the wide mode and slowly diminishes by about 32 mm. Pretty much all lenses have these aberrations but with this one the effect is rather different. Normally I separate the color channels and mix them back up in After Effects or Vegas and take the red and or the blue channel and scale them up or down until the fringing disappears. However with the Red Zoom at 18mm the Red-Green fringing appears strongest half way from center to edge and than actually diminishes towards the edge of the frame and than the blue-Yellow channel needs more correction than it needed before that. In other words, to ultimately perfect the image
it will take more than just three additional layers in After Effects, probably seven but have yet to see. So to some extend the CA is hard to pinpoint as it changes across the frame at the same focal length. Now I throw this out simply as an observation for people who already own this lens and for the ones who are about to buy it. I certainly do not want to discourage anybody to get it while its available at what I would call a dumping price. The next contender would be an Alura for 20k more, same range, weight, distortion, better mechanics, but the
final image probably indistinguishable.