Viltrox has just announced the Viltrox AF 28mm f/4.5 Chip lens, a fixed-aperture autofocus lens for the Nikon Z mount, which has been available for the Sony E mount for some time. This pancake lens is pretty small, inexpensive, and has some interesting features all for $99. In this review, I’ll be taking a look at this fun little lens, which I tested on the Nikon Z6.
Introduction
The basic features of this lens are:
- Mount: Nikon Z, Sony E, Fujifilm X (APS-C)
- Focal Length: 28mm
- Angle of View: 73.42º
- Minimum Focus Distance: 0.35m (1.15′)
- Design: 6 elements in 6 groups
- Length: 15.3mm (0.6″)
- Weight: 60g
- Filter Size: Does not accept filters
Yeah, this lens is small – as in, I can’t even tell the difference between it and the camera body without a lens. Honestly, this lens is giving me nostalgia about the point-and-shoot days!
To add to its compactness, the Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 doesn’t even have a traditional lens cap. Instead, it’s got a built-in lens shield, which sounds weird at first but quite handy. The shield is activated with a simple switch that can be engaged whether the camera is on or off, and it means no worrying about lens caps when you’re just out shooting.
Despite its compact and light design, the 28mm f/4.5 is mostly made out of metal including the mount. Overall, it feels sturdy.
One disappointing fact about the lens is a lack of manual focus ring. The lens does have a ribbed edge, but that’s just to help you lock the lens on the camera. The autofocus itself is decent and accurate, but it pulses a little and it’s a little slow.
You can see the front lens element move while focusing, though it’s always under the level of the lens face and never protrudes. This does add to the potential for dust to get into the barrel of the lens over time.
An important thing you should know is that this is a fixed aperture lens. You’ve got f/4.5, and that’s all you get.
Is that a big deal? Certainly, if you’re planning to use this lens like any other lens. However, for the intended purpose – essentially a substitute body cap – I think it’s less of a problem. This lens is viable for things like street photography, environmental portraits, and events. It can be used for landscapes in a pinch, but you’ll just have to accept that you won’t be able to stop down to get more depth of field – so you’ll either need to avoid nearby foregrounds, accept some out-of-focus blur, or focus stack.
Optical Features
The Viltrox 28mm f/4.5 is a simple lens with 6 elements in 6 groups. Two of the elements are extra-low dispersion elements and two are aspherical. It also has various coatings including what Viltrox calls an HD Nano-coating, and a fluorine coated front element to guard against water and dust. So, let’s see how all this stuff translates into the real world!
First, let’s check distortion. Viltrox claims minimal distortion with this lens, and that seems accurate to me. Here’s a grid so you can see how much:
There’s a small amount of pincushion distortion, but not to bad. You’ll also notice that there’s a fair amount of vignetting. Here’s how it looks against a fairly uniform light source, uncropped:
The center to extreme corner falloff is pretty strong, but still mostly correctable as long as you’re not recovering too many shadows in the corners.
While testing this lens, I noticed that it has some significant focus breathing. Here’s a close and far focus shot superimposed of the same subject (of course, it’s out of focus for one of the shots).
What about sharpness? I compared the lens to my go-to Nikon Z lens, the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.4, also set at f/4.5. Here is the center performance:
The Viltrox has lower contrast than the Nikon Z 50mm f/1.4. However, it isn’t too bad, and I have no real complaints about its performance in the center.
What about the corners? Here’s how it looks under my best attempt at getting the same framing:
This time, the Nikon wins pretty easily. The Viltrox is clearly softer and has significantly less contrast. But the result is still acceptable and better than I had expected for the Viltrox. Pancake lenses rarely perform at a high level, and considering that this is a $99 pancake, it is not a bad result.
There’s another interesting feature of this lens, which is its unusual starburst effect. It was designed to give a very long, thin starburst effect when shooting tiny point sources of light. You can see it in this sunstar, but it produces them quite easily with almost any point source of light. Kind of surprising for a fixed f/4.5 lens:
What about the bokeh? With a focal length of 28mm and a fixed aperture of f/4.5, not to mention the minimum focusing distance of 0.35m, it’s unlikely you’ll be getting much background blur with this thing. Nevertheless, at the minimum focus distance of 35cm, you can see the bokeh a bit
I would say it’s decently smooth with some nervousness, but the nervousness is really only visible with specular highlights.
And you probably were wondering about that flare, right? Pretty interesting, if you ask me. If you position the lens just right, you can get these injections of flare of different colors, which I thought was pretty radical. You can see one example in the image above. Because this lens doesn’t have a hood nor any way to attach one, you will have to watch out for flare (or should I say flair?) in backlit situations, but I found that you can use your hand to block it out if you want.
Chromatic aberrations appear in very backlit situations such as this one:
Here are two crops, one from the center and one from the top-right corner, so you can see what we’re up against:
In other situations, such as shooting environmental portraits outdoors with strong light, I could not find any trace of these, so I think in practice, it’s really nothing to worry about.
Conclusion
The Viltrox AF 28mm f/4.5 Chip lens is a fun lens to use. It’s a bit optically wonky (not always in a bad way), and decently sharp. It has some quirks like funny flaring, but I learned to love its character, and now I even want to experiment with its rainbow flaring capability. The small size means it’s a great way to shoot at 28mm without carrying much extra weight, while leaving plenty of money in your wallet.
However, I think that the main use of this lens is as a body cap substitute. A lens without manual focus, without the ability to change aperture, and with a quirky optical performance is unlikely to be anyone’s go-to tool for important shoots.
If you’re interested in getting this lens, consider using the B&H links below to support independent reviews such as this one.
we have to be honest Jason, what can you expect for that price. This lens(je) offers perspectives. A lot of practice with this lens under the right circumstances can produce interesting images ….
Yes I agree. It’s decent for what it is and I like it because 28mm is just a “fun” focal length for me and not something I need for continuous demanding work – not like the long glass :)
It is a bit unfair to compare this lens with a 50mm f/1.8 lens at f/4.5 – not only a standard lens but also 6x more expensive. Compare it to the 4x more expensive 26mm pancake from Nikon i would say.
And that Nikon pancake never turns sharp in the corners if I must believe the reviews.
I’m afraid to say that I don’t own the 26mm pancake, nor any other Nikon Z lenses close to 28mm. The 50mm f/1.4 Z was the closest focal length I had. And I’m not comparing it in the sene of saying the 50mm Z is a better value, only as a reference for decent image quality with a relatively crude test like this as a stand-in until Spencer can test it numerically.
“There’s another interesting feature of this lens, which is its unusual starburst effect. It was designed to give a very long, thin starburst effect when shooting tiny point sources of light. You can see it in this sunstar, but it produces them quite easily with almost any point source of light. Kind of surprising for a fixed f/4.5 lens:”
That’s because the front lens element is placed behind an octagonal aperture (opening) — each of its eight sides adds knife-edge diffraction. This octagonal aperture is clearly visible in the image captioned:
“The switch on the front opens and closes the front element shield”
That makes sense, Pete!
How do you think it compares to the Z 28mm 2.8 for everyday candid/street-type photography?
In terms of versatility, I’d prefer the Z 28mm f/2.8, since it allows the use of different apertures and has a manual focus ring. That said, the tiny size and inexpensiveness of the Viltrox are appealing if you want a take-it-anywhere lens.
Optically, I don’t want to make any premature calls before we test the Viltrox in our lab, but I’d personally expect the Nikon to measure better of the two.