Zeiss Touit 2.8/50 macro lens to be priced around $1,000
Brian Hirschfeld talked to the folks at Zeiss during the Photo Plus Expo and reported that the price of the Zeiss Touit 2.8/50 macro lens will be around $1,000:
"A very nice man from Carl Zeiss showed me a prototype of an upcoming lens for the Zeiss Touit line of lenses, the Ziess 50mm f/2.8 Touit Macro. This lens will be available in Sony NEX and Fuijifilm X-mount’s at the beginning of 2014 for a price of somewhere around ~$1,000.00. Since this was a prototype the autofocus wasn’t the best but I was assured and expect this will improve before the final version considering how well most mirrorless lenses are focusing now. The lens was very sharp and got down to 1:1 and I wish that it would come in the MFT mount, though I understand why it won’t. My main complaints (which many share) are that these lenses don’t seem to be weather sealed or weather proof or really weather anything and that the focusing ring is lackluster at best. My main concern / complaint which Zeiss is apparently aware of (but not doing anything about?) is the absence of a focusing scale which would have been especially nice on a macro lens considering there is no way to know you are at the minimum focusing distance which is super annoying. This seems like a big oversight to me, but oh well."
B&H has listed the shipping date of the Zeiss Touit 2.8/50 lens as February 27th, 2014.