Do you believe in miracles? Well, Chinese company Venus Optics, just pulled one. They have made extremely wide lens with f2.8 and zero distortion!

It was never easy to make a fisheye lens that was well optically corrected, and it was infinitely harder to make a rectilinear lens of very wide coverage without a series of “collateral aberrations”.

Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D is a manual focus prime lens that provides ultra wide-angle coverage up to 113° angle of view — widest in its class. And it’s tiny! Is it possible to make a good optics in such small package? Let’s start with compromising side…

• It is only useful for APS-C and smaller sensors. Do not pretend to be surprised.
• It is manual focus only. At 9mm (13,5 in FF) it really does not matter, because of enormous DoF. Much more important is its light weight that will allow you to carry it with you whole day, and is suitable to use with gimbals.
• There is a slight field curvature at f2.8, but… find me another in its class that is better.
• Terribly chosen blue shade for the lens ring :(

And now the goody goods!

• Small (60 x 53mm), light (215g) and extremely well made out of metal.
• Despite wide angle, there are no chromatic aberations at all!
• Two aspherical elements plus three extra-low dispersion elements which successfully correct the chromatic aberration, also deliver close-to-zero distortion and corner to corner sharpness.
• Despite wide angle you can use filters on it with 49mm filter thread!
• It has only 7 Aperture Blades. You won’t get much of a bokeh from any ultra wide-angle anyway, but when you get to the closest distance (12cm) with this lens, you will get a decent background blur. Max. magnification is 1:7.5.
• In addition, no coma — it could be your ideal lens for astrophotography!

Lens review with test samples you can find here.

Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D is available in Fuji X, Sony E & Canon EF-M mounts, but be can easily and cheaply adapted to a M43, so we can also count that as an 18mm M43 lens.

Price: $499.00

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