by Klaus Schroiff, published January 2021 Introduction Over the last few years, Laowa has created an arsenal of ultra-wide prime lenses across all relevant systems – and they are still looking for further niches in this segment. They just released the Laowa 10mm f/2 Zero-D MFT. Those who have followed their journey may be a bit surprised. After all, they are also offering a 7.5mm f/2 MFT and a 9mm f/2.8 which aren’t all that old either. However, not everybody needs an extreme wide-angle lens and a 10mm lens (“20mm” full-format) is easier to handle. Beyond the paper-specs are some…
Author: Klaus
The following rules are enforced across every forum on this board; they are the global rules and must be followed at all times. Your membership here is also conditional on you following them so please take the time to familiarize yourself with them before joining in on discussion. 1 – No inappropriate content: This is a forum used by both people at work and minors so it is important that strict boundaries are set for what can and can’t be posted here. Inappropriate content is any content that we deem is not fit to be displayed on this website. By…
Introduction Canon has been THE dominant player in the super-telephoto arena for decades. There are many photos of sports events where you can see a myriad of white Canon L lenses in the press section. Besides lots of prime lenses, Canon has always offered moderately fast long tele-zoom lenses, with the most popular one being the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 USM L IS (II). However, during recent years this lens felt a bit conservative regarding a competition that moved on to 500mm and even 600mm at the long end. And for sports/wildlife photographers, nothing beats a long focal length but a…
by Klaus Schroiff, published November 2020 Introduction Fast standard zoom lenses are incredibly popular in the photographic community – yet the surrounding design challenges in this lens class are about as tough as they get. To date, we haven’t reviewed a single lens of this type that was truly outstanding (on high megapixel cameras). However, that doesn’t mean that they are trying. One of the latest contenders is the Sigma 24-70mm f/2.8 DG DN ART. Sigma wasn’t OVERLY successful with their previous attempts so let’s see whether there’s progress in the mirrorless world. The lens is available both in Sony…
by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2020 Introduction Super-tele zoom lenses have been around for many years in the DSLR world. Especially Sigma and Tamron have a long history of providing several different and also interesting designs up to xx-600mm. Interestingly, the OEMs never dared to go there to date. However, such lenses were not available for mirrorless systems … that is until the release of the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS. You may think that such a lens from Sony is pretty much unaffordable – and for many users, it’ll be out of reach indeed – but it’s actually…
by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2020 Introduction Laowa has explored many extreme lens designs ever since they started in 2013. So far they have focused most of their efforts on either ultra-wide or macro lenses. With the inevitable demise of the DSLR segment, many of their latest lenses are now targeting the current sweet spot of the market, thus full-format mirrorless cameras. Just prior to the review, they released a set of 3 quite insane prime lenses – an all manual 9mm f/5.6 FF RL, an 11mm f/4.5 FF RL, and the Laowa 14mm f/4 FF RL Zero-D. The latter…
by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2020 Introduction Laowa has released a couple of very interesting lenses over the last years. Like many other Chinese players, they are focusing on rather extreme designs. Their 24mm f/14 2x Macro Probe is probably the most exotic one and quite famous in the video community by now. And regarding their more conventional macro lenses, we were very impressed by their recent 65mm f2.8 2x APO Ultra-Macro for APS-C mirrorless cameras as well as the 100mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO full-format lens. However, Laowa hasn’t forgotten about the Micro-Four-Thirds (MFT) community. So in this review, we are…
by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2020 Introduction During recent years, mirrorless lenses suffered from a disease – they got bigger and heavier. In fact, many mirrorless lenses are now more obese than their “former” DSLR counterparts despite all the marketing palaver promising the opposite. Of course, this happened for a reason. As a rule of thumbs in optical design, bigger and more complex is usually better – or it’s at least easier to achieve certain goals.While this was all cool for a while because there were simply too few mirrorless lenses available, most consumers are no longer demanding “any” lens…
Introduction Canon wouldn’t be Canon without their extremely fast prime lenses. And why bother with an f/1.4 aperture when you can also develop an f/1.2 lens, right? Meet the Canon RF 85mm f/1.2 USM L. Just from the high-level specs, you may think that it’s a new incarnation of the EF version but it’s actually a brand new design. Besides the “usual” aspherical and UD elements, it also incorporates Canon’s BR (Blue Spectrum Refractive) element for superior chromatic correction. We’ll see the effect of all this goodness later. One of the more unfortunate side effects of choosing f/1.2 over f/1.4…
by Klaus Schroiff, published July 2020 Introduction As of the time of this review, the Micro-Four-Thirds (MFT) world is in a bit of turmoil about the future of Olympus – and some odd YouTubers are questioning whether the system has still a place in the industry at all. It may then be the right time to remind those skeptics – once again – that the system has aspects that no other current system provides. That’s primarily a small package size and low weight. Now you may argue about “equivalency” here but fact remains that the sheer number of compact lenses…