Have a Samyang 12 mm fish eye. Distortion is easy to fix in Camera raw but the sharp stars at the edge all got stretched and trees and building all in an angle. If Laowa 12 mm can produce less sharp stars without needing distortion correction, would it actually result in sharper star than the stretch out stars after distortion correction? May be my distortion correction skill need to go beyond camera raw in photoshop?
Paul Tilley
March 13, 2022 7:49 pm
Hi Spencer As I purchased mine during the crowdfunding development programme, your review is a little bit late for me, but was interested in what you had to say. And as I’m not sure if there are any quality differences between the early models and the later ones, all I can say is that I’ve been pretty happy with mine, once I worked out the best way to use it, which for me, is to make sure the lens is level, otherwise distortion kicks in big time. Like Mike Cranfield, I use mine for the occasional real estate photography shoot, and find it good for that type of photography. I also use it for landscapes and astrophotography and agree, it could be a little sharper, but it does make panoramas really easy, by just cropping out the unwanted parts of the scene. One thing I did note as an omission from your review, was its use at small focal lengths, where it not only provides interesting detail oriented images – with a range of depth of field optiond, but also becomes quite an interesting, wide-angled macro lens, to achieve substantial depth of field, without the need for focus stacking. Anyway… keep up the good work and I will check out your astro-lens comparison.
Mike Cranfield
March 12, 2019 3:31 pm
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.
Use with a sony 7siii and no complaints whatsoever. Video, still images and this lens works oh so well.
Bob
March 9, 2019 4:18 pm
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!
Nasim Mansurov
Admin
March 8, 2019 3:06 pm
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.
Steven Brewer
March 8, 2019 7:55 am
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.
Basil
March 7, 2019 10:57 pm
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.
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.
Tomáš
March 7, 2019 2:36 am
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/compa…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.
rolischorr
March 6, 2019 12:29 pm
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.
Have a Samyang 12 mm fish eye. Distortion is easy to fix in Camera raw but the sharp stars at the edge all got stretched and trees and building all in an angle. If Laowa 12 mm can produce less sharp stars without needing distortion correction, would it actually result in sharper star than the stretch out stars after distortion correction? May be my distortion correction skill need to go beyond camera raw in photoshop?
Hi Spencer
As I purchased mine during the crowdfunding development programme, your review is a little bit late for me, but was interested in what you had to say. And as I’m not sure if there are any quality differences between the early models and the later ones, all I can say is that I’ve been pretty happy with mine, once I worked out the best way to use it, which for me, is to make sure the lens is level, otherwise distortion kicks in big time. Like Mike Cranfield, I use mine for the occasional real estate photography shoot, and find it good for that type of photography. I also use it for landscapes and astrophotography and agree, it could be a little sharper, but it does make panoramas really easy, by just cropping out the unwanted parts of the scene.
One thing I did note as an omission from your review, was its use at small focal lengths, where it not only provides interesting detail oriented images – with a range of depth of field optiond, but also becomes quite an interesting, wide-angled macro lens, to achieve substantial depth of field, without the need for focus stacking.
Anyway… keep up the good work and I will check out your astro-lens comparison.
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…
Use with a sony 7siii and no complaints whatsoever. Video, still images and this lens works oh so well.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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/compa…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.
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.