Viltrox AF 85mm F1.8 STM FE: A Lot of Lens For The Money

Dustin Abbott finished his Viltrox AF 85mm F1.8 STM FE review, which you can watch above. Below are excerpts from this video:

  • The Viltrox AF 85mm is a very good lens
  • Very nicely built
  • A lot of lens for the money
  • No weather sealing
  • Everything is metal and glass
  • The focus by wire manual focus is well done
  • Automatically detects motion on the focus ring and will magnify the focus area and give you an on-screen distance scale
  • Major focus changes take a few rotations
  • The 85mm AF lens identifies as the batis, but he 85mm MF identifies as the Sony lens
  • The batis profile works very well for this lens and it is similar
  • The AF and MF versions have the same optical makeup on paper, but the AF has a little better contrast, which might be sample variation
  • The Viltrox is super sharp at f/1.8 like the Samyang, but the Samyang has less vignetting
  • Samyang is maybe a hair shaper with a little more contrast at f/2.8 but both are super sharp
  • By f/4 both look almost perfect into the corners even on a Sony a7RIII but the Samyang still is a hair better
  • The Viltrox has some chromatic aberration that can be fixed easily.
  • Eye AF works very very well
  • Skin tones look nice and there is tons of detail
  • Pet Eye AF works very well too
  • When closing down the lens for landscapes use single-point AF, because C-AF will pulse at times
  • Deep depth of fiend AF isn’t great
  • Fringing isn’t bad with bokeh
  • Nothing negative to say about the bokeh
  • Bokeh looks really really nice with close subjects
  • Does a good job with human AF
  • If you stop down and use AF-C for video the camera will pulse while recording video, which Viltrox will try to fix with a Firmware update
  • Micro USB port in the lens for doing FW updates
  • Silent AF
  • A beautifully built lens that handles well, has good AF performance for portraits and is inexpensive, but not get for video

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VILTROX 85mm f/1.8: B&H Photo / Amazon
VILTROX 56mm f/1.4 (Coming Soon): B&H Photo / Amazon
VILTROX 33mm f/1.4 (Coming Soon): B&H Photo / Amazon
VILTROX 23mm f/1.4 (Coming Soon): B&H Photo / Amazon

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