Richard Wong released his Laowa 9mm f/5.6mm review and man is it wide. Below is a summary of his review:
- Super close focus distance
- At f/5.6 to f/8 focused on 1m everything is in focus so you can vlog with it easily.
- No OIS, but if your camera has IBIS it should be able to stabilize wide well enough
- Worlds wides ultra-wide-angle rectilinear lens for full-frame cameras
- Laowa will have an 11mm f/4.5 and 40mm f/4 lens that will be the same lens mounts
- This lens might be too wide because it’s beyond anything you have experienced
- Normally he knows the view angle, but not with this lens
- Just tilting up or down slightly can dramatically change the composition or even stepping forward or back
- The lens is so wide that it makes his Nikon ultra-wide-angle look standard
- Can focus down to 0.1m
- No indicator for how to line the lens up with the body
- Image sharpness pretty good at f/5.6 gets better by f/8
- By f/16 the center gets a little softer
- The corners are soft at f/5.6, but it improves a little at f/8, but they are sharpest at f/16
- Distortion isn’t bad past 1m
- f/5.6 no Sunstar in the photo, but it is there by f/8 through f/22
- If you go beyond f/8 you get kind of a double sunstar
- Color fringing is well-controlled shooting right into the sun
- You can get some ghosting shooting into the sun
- Vynyetting is quite noticeable even stopped down
- They could make the lens quite a bit bigger if they want to reduce vynyetting
- Ghosting is quite easy and the corners aren’t the sharpest, but it doesn’t stop him from having a lot of fun taking photos with this lens
- It’s such a fun lens that you will overlook the flaws because before this lens you couldn’t shoot this wide without using a fisheye and defishing is which would reduce the quality more than this 9mm lens
- Image quality isn’t perfect, but it makes shooting wide easy
- Laowa always wants to create something different and very unique
Laowa 9mm f/5.6 FF RL: Venus Optics / B&H Photo / Amazon
