Beautiful but slightly flawed (as you say) like a slightly over-cooked soufflé.

Seems to work well. Not as dramatic as the Laowa. I'm not quite sure which emulates the XPan look the best.

h, I like the lighting in this one even more! Floating in a pool of light )

Hardly overcooked. You have kept the 8E bokeh intact and made a lovely b&w. As for the MFD, I wouldn't mind having it shorter for the 50ies. And the 43. And the DA70, which is really quite bad in that regard.

That's haunting processing, alright!

here's a 24mm vxpan test from earlier, for the halibut
http://www.tmphillips.com/pg/picture.php?/5087/category/20&metadata

i take it back.. i am now noticing that a lot of the wide shots that are catching my eye are with the 30mm (17mm equiv)

so sure enough.. the fov for the xpan with the 45mm lens is something like 24mm or 74 degrees across. xpan seems much wider to me much of the time from my swim through the flickr pool.. go figure... there is a 30mm lens for the xpan and the fov for that is about 17mm or 94 degree across. that lens is probably a lot more rarely used though... i tried my 24mm for one indoor shot just now and it doesn't seem to have that same visual impact of xpan with the same crop... more experimentation is needed.

Interesting info/suggestion savoche. I hadn't figured out the field of view. So far had just guessed that it's three times 45mm for the width but it sounds like I am wrong.. I have a 24mm S-Tak so maybe I will to try VXPan with that lens next.

Not what I'd consider a classic Helios 44-2 scene!! However, the f2/fast speed has delivered some very tasty in-and-out of focus combinations, and the shadows on the walls are indeed rather haunted looking.