Venus Optics Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D Review
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Once again, Spencer: Very nice sample pictures. Especially the one with flare in left upper corner and it’s sibling with a slightly different frame were showing well the problem.
Watt I missed in your review: I kind of blame Laowa for going the easy way: all metal, so easy to manufacture; no AF, so cheap to develop; no electrical aperture, so no license fees or lawsuit issues. And worst of all: no electrical contacts tell the camera which lens is on and which aperture is set – I usually like to see what I did when I took a picture.
Irix is delivering EXIF, Laowa can’t do. Quality is mediocre, yes, so I possibly will look at the new Samyang 10 mm when it becomes available. And of course, I missed the two Sigmas with 14 and 14-24 mm and maybe also their 12-24 zoom as I suspect all three offer much more than the Laowa.
Very true, Joachim, this is an extremely manual lens in almost every way. From the AF perspective, it doesn’t matter too much to me, since depth of field is so extreme. I just set the focusing ring to 5 feet and f/11 knowing that pretty much everything in the frame would be focused how I want.
The Nikon version of the lens does convey aperture values to EXIF data, though, assuming the camera supports it. It essentially acts as an AI lens in that regard (done via the AI tab). All the photos I took with the D810 have the proper aperture listed in the EXIF data. However, my photos from the Z7 do not, since the FTZ adapter does not have the AI tab. But the lack of an electrical aperture is annoying indeed. I much prefer changing aperture with a dial on the camera rather than a ring on the lens.
Compared to the Sigma 14mm f/1.8, it’s no contest – the Sigma is much sharper than the Laowa. Our review of the 14mm f/1.8 (photographylife.com/revie…dg-hsm-art) shows that it’s sharper than the Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 even at f/1.8!
I haven’t tested the Sigma 12-24mm f/4, but from what I’ve seen online it appears to be a very sharp lens as well. For maximum image quality at 12mm or wider, I’d go for the Sigma 12-24mm f/4 or the Canon 11-24mm f/4.
Page 1, about ‘beating it in sheer focal length’, you are missi g the 10mm Voigtländer (not f/2.8, of course). They also have 12 and 15mm, if I remember correctly.
Thanks, glad you noticed. Just fixed it.
I’m wondering how difficult the new Samyang 10mm will be to use. Even 12 is just way too large, to me at least. I don’t think any of the places I visited I ever felt needed such a wide FOV. I suppose there are cases where it’s definitely worth it but if I’m honest I’d rather a 14mm and just stitching a panorama, if I really needed more in view.
On a side note, I think that the copy of your Irix lens is a real pup, which surprised me quite a bit because from most other tests I’ve seen, it performed quite a bit better than the Laowa as far as sharpness is concerned. Just saying this because I wouldn’t want you to think the 15 f/2.4 is plain bad, full stop, although it really doesn’t say much about Irix’s QA, if it leads to such a big discrepancy in sample variation.
I really wish that when developing a fast wide-angle prime companies tried harder to correct for coma. Its effect affects edge sharpness and also, who wouldn’t want to use these lenses on a starry night? Having to stop them down really defeats the purpose of having a fast prime to begin with, at least from that point of view (not like it’s only Laowa dropping the ball there, Nikon’s 20mm f/1.8’s coma is severely disappointing too, for instance). But oh well, can’t spend all the time complaining :) thanks again for the review, cheers!
The new Samyang will be pretty wild. I don’t know that I will have a use for anything that wide, but hopefully we’ll review it and figure out for sure.
You are right about the Irix. I only tested one copy, and if we do a review, I will test at least one more. But that Imatest data was further enforced by the five lens astrophotography test I did (photographylife.com/lands…phy-lenses) which showed the Irix to have less than stellar performance. However, it did come out slightly ahead of the Laowa, which may be a consequence of focusing at infinity rather than test-chart distance, or may be due to other factors like having less coma.
I have read the Irix will be a lot better near infinity focus ( landscape)
www.lenstip.com/486.4…ution.html
With these wide angles there is always some special behaviour concerning sharpness and the field of sharpness…
Thanks for the review! i stick to my nikkor 14-24mm
It’s pretty hard to beat the Nikon 14-24mm, Pieter! That’s a good point about the Irix. As I just mentioned to Tomáš above, when I tested the Irix vs the Laowa focused at infinity for Milky Way photography, the Irix came out ahead (though still 4th place out of 5 lenses tested).
It’s worth mentioning that the site you linked says the Irix performs slightly better than the Samyang 14mm f/2.8 “so praised by us before.” Given sample variation, I don’t doubt that their Irix has max numbers better than their Samyang. But – no hard feelings to Samyang – the 14mm f/2.8 is nothing more than an ok lens optically. It’s an amazing value, but its sharpness numbers (and distortion numbers) are handily beaten by many other 14mm lenses out there, primes and zooms. This is immediately clear to me just looking at real-world photos, let alone test chart images. For a fellow lens-testing website, I would have expected more context than just calling all these lenses great.
Nice review, and the conclusions mostly agree with what we hear elsewhere. This review contains MTF figures for some lenses that haven’t been reviewed here (unless I’m doing something wrong…) – so I’m intrigued. Will we see formal reviews for these as well soon? Thanks!
Thank you, Basil! You’re not doing anything wrong; a lot of the comparisons are from lenses we haven’t reviewed yet, even though we have measured their Imatest results. Unfortunately, I don’t have many sample photos or real-world tests from the other lenses at this point. It may still be a while for the official reviews.
Ok. Thanks for the info!
Thank you Spencer, I appreciate the time and effort that went into your review. This was a thoughtful and helpful review. It would be more helpful if the Imatest scores were graphed on the same scale for all of the MTF comparisons. For example, in the 1. Laowa 12mm f/2.8 vs Samyang 14mm f/2.8 and the 4. Laowa 12mm f/2.8 vs Nikon 14-24mm f/2.8 comparisons, you visually inflate the relative performance of the latter lens in each comparison. It might seem nitpicky, but this might lead someone to interpret this as bias on your part (personally I don’t believe that’s what you intended, but you open yourself up to that interpretation). I would recommend that your upper bound on the “Y” axis be 3500 for all the graphs.
Steven, it was actually my fault for providing Spencer with a wrong graph. Ever since we switched to testing all lenses on 45 MP sensors (all previous tests will be replaced with results from the Nikon Z7), the potential high for Imatest numbers has increased, so we are now doing 4000 as the maximum. I updated the graphs for the Samyang as well as the Nikon 14-24mm. If you see any graphs with 3500, please clear your browser cache and reload the page.
Thanks, Nasim. I enjoy following this website and appreciate the hard work you and your contributors put in to make this site so helpful and interesting.
I’ve already got a Tamron 15-30/2.8 so, for us, a fisheye 12mm (Rokinon) was actually the more interesting option, from a creative perspective. And obviously at a much lower price. And I’m impressed that the Rokinon allows aperture control electronically, which isn’t even the case for Nikon’s own ai-s manual focus lenses. As for correcting distortion, I found I can get pretty amazing results using the Fisheye-Hemi plugin to Photoshop, with a few minutes worth of patience. All in all, a pretty versatile choice. And way less expensive!
I use this lens on indoor real estate photography, and it’s brilliant! Not one of my clients have ever commented on any of the shortfalls you point out in your article…
I feel that sometimes we are too spec driven and fail to realize that we are taking photos not comparing specs…
I bought this 12mm lens to take pictures! Not for its poor vignetting or metal construction or lack of rear waterproofing or lack of electrical contacts or manual focus.
I’m a photographer who takes pictures…
I’m so sorry this lens was so poor in your eyes…
It works great for me!
Worth every penny…