This happening where the dark outlines are against a bright sky, causing colour fringing. It's a lens defect and it won't appear on general front lit subjects. It will be particularly noticeable with branches against bright sky.

What lens is that?

They will have to have some glass to maintain infinity focus, unless the adapter fits flush into the mount like the Pentax Adapter K.

To be honest, there's so little difference in these tests that I would go for the versatility of the zoom.

However, there may be more differnce in a richly detailed A3 print that could make the 31mm Limited more valuable as a result.

Only Nathan can decide.....

The classic light source for artists is the North facing window, which is said to give the most pleasing light to paint by. Studios with a large window usually have it North facing. This extends to photography very well and gives flattering portrait light.

The best light of all will be a North facing window, if you have one!

Personally I'd use a far smaller aperture, more like f22 for a subject this close and with this much depth to it.

The second thing is where to focus, and that would be about a third of the way into the depth that you want to be in focus.

I feel there's too much out of focus here, especially with the large shadow across the image.

So for me it would be on a tripod, natural light and the smallest possible aperture. Shutter speed could be quite long, so using the 2 second delayed action will ensure we don't add any shake from operating the shutter release.

Hope that helps!

Still going with Lens 1, but not much in it. Your target is unfortunately focused on the nose of the bear, which is the most difficult part to judge by. Perhaps it it were focused on a flat subject with lots of detail (newspaper page?) then we could see how crisp it was?

My initial reaction to these is that Lens 1 seems very slightly better, but it really depends on how they both perform generally. CA aside, maybe for more usual subjects one would be clearly better than the other.

For example, a front lit bit of architecture, or a portrait. I'd really want to use the lenses and see how they fared with a variety of subjecta.

This test shows up some properties, but doesn't show us resolution, contrast with normal subjects, even sharpness as the subject is substantially through glass.

If it's very close, other considerations will be common filter sizes with other lenses owned, close focusing ability, compactness, or even matching ergonomically with the rest of your lenses.

Hope those initial thoughts help a little.

I'll be having a look later....

It is possible. I've bought kit lenses with a body and just sold them on eBay without opening them at all. All things are possible, however unlikely they may seem.