Voigtländer's new lens lets you 'control' bokeh

Cosina Voigtländer has announced a new manual focus lens that has quite a nifty feature - controllable spherical aberration.

Yes, the company's new Portrait Heliar 75mm F1.8 is the company's first lens that lets photographers adjust the look of the bokeh.

Cosina has designed its Portrait Heliar 75mm F1.8 lens for full-frame Sony E-mount cameras.

The lens is manual focus and features an aperture control ring as you might expect, but it also features its unique selling point - the front of the lens features a control ring marked 'over' and 'under.'

This special ring lets you tweak how soft or sharp the out-of-focus parts of your photo look (allowing control over that dreamy bokeh effect).

Turn the ring toward the ‘under’ side and you’ll get a softer, creamier background blur, but it also slightly softens the whole image and lowers contrast.

Move it to the ‘over’ side and the blur gets a bit edgier and less round, with a touch more sharpness overall. The ‘normal’ setting gives you the sharpest, most contrasty image — basically how a regular lens would capture the scene.

According to Voigtländer, changing this ring doesn’t just mess with blur — it also shifts your focus point a little, darkens the corners (vignetting), and even changes your exposure by about 1/3 of a stop.

So its possible you might need to tweak your settings after making adjustments.

As for the lens itself, it’s got six elements in three groups, a 9-blade aperture, and even though it’s manual focus, it has electronic contacts so your camera still gets Exif data. Plus, there’s a built-in distance encoder that helps with in-body stabilisation and activates focus magnification.

Voigtländer is distributed in Australia by Mainline Photographics - we've reached out to them to see when it will be available down under.