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