Laowa 15mm f/2 FE Zero-D
Andy Westlake admires a large-aperture, ultra-wideangle prime for full-frame mirrorless that sports really impressive optics
Andy Westlake sees how this ultra-wideangle prime lens for full-frame mirrorless operates
Laowa may not yet be as well-known a brand as its big Japanese rivals, but its parent company Venus Optics is surely the most interesting – and ambitious – of the new breed of lens makers that have appeared out of China over the past few years. Unlike most, it’s quickly progressed to making genuinely top-quality optics, which often fill market niches that aren’t met elsewhere. Its two key specialist subjects are macro and ultra-wideangle: the 15mm f/2 we’re interested in here falls into the latter category.
This lens is part of a family of ultra-wide primes that are based around broadly the same optical design, but scaled for different sensor sizes. Last year I enjoyed testing its tiny 7.5mm f/2 for Micro Four Thirds and 12mm f/2.8 for full-frame DSLRs, and the firm has also recently introduced a 9mm f/2 for APS- C mirrorless. However this 15mm f/2 is designed for full-frame mirrorless, which is the hottest sector in the camera market right now. It’s available in Sony FE mount, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it will be one of the first third-party optics to appear in the new Canon RF and Nikon Z mounts.
The Zero- D in the lens’s moniker denotes its key optical characteristic, namely close-to-zero curvilinear distortion. Most wideangle lenses show at least some degree of barrel distortion, which tends to get more pronounced the broader the field of view becomes. Laowa,
Features
With its 15mm focal length, the lens covers a diagonal angle of view of fully 110°. To achieve this, it employs an optical formula with 12 elements in 9 groups, including two aspherical elements and three extra-low dispersion glass elements that together help suppress distortion and chromatic aberration.
As with all Laowa designs, the 15mm f/2 is entirely manual, with no electronics. Focusing is via a large ring towards the front of the barrel, which drives a rear-focus design that means there’s no change in the lens’s length or balance between infinity and the minimum object distance of 15cm. Meanwhile the aperture is set using a slimmer ring closer to the camera body. This closes- down the 7-bladed aperture diaphragm directly, with detents at one-stop intervals.
For videographers, sliding a switch on the side of the barrel will transform the aperture to clickless operation.
While many ultra-wide lenses feature a bulbous front element that precludes the use of screw-in filters, Laowa has produced a design with a 72mm thread. Alongside the Voigtländer 15mm f/4.5, it’s currently the widest lens available in Sony E-mount that allows landscape photographers to easily use polarisers and neutral density filters. Surrounding the filter thread is a bayonet mount for the shallow petal-type metal hood.
Build and handling
The moment you take the Laowa 15mm f/2 out of its box, you can’t help but be impressed by its build quality. The barrel employs all- metal construction, including the finely ridged focus and aperture rings. One notable characteristic is that the aperture ring’s click-stops are somewhat soft, which can make it difficult to operate by feel alone, but the flip-side is that it’s easy to set to intermediate positions. The 7-bladed diaphragm gives a perfectly symmetrical opening all the way down to its smallest setting of f/22. Indeed the only real criticism is that on my review sample at least, the lens hood didn’t click into place anywhere near positively enough. But Venus Optics says it’s aware of this, and that the problem should be fixed in more recent production examples.
In terms of handling, the lens is a good match to the Sony Alpha 7 II body that I tested it on. At 82mm in length and 500g in weight, it’s far more compact than such a fast ultra-wideangle could ever be for a DSLR. Indeed it’s broadly similar in size to Samyang’s autofocus AF 14mm F2.8 FE, which covers a wider field of view but gathers a stop less light.
One quirk I found was that the camera often struggled to meter correctly, requiring around +1EV compensation to give a good exposure. But it’s difficult to blame this on the lens alone, and of course one advantage of mirrorless is that you can see and fix such problems in the viewfinder prior to releasing the shutter.
The lack of any electronics has some knock- on effects on operation. The set aperture isn’t displayed in the viewfinder, and you’ll have to enter the focal length manually on the camera for image stabilisation to work properly. You also have to engage any focus aids manually by assigning them to a function button, in contrast to electronic manual-focus lenses like the Zeiss Loxia range that can engage magnified view automatically when you turn the focus ring. When you come to look at your image files after shooting, you’ll find that neither the focal length nor the aperture are recorded in the EXIF data, either.
None of these are deal-breakers; they just demand a slightly longer-winded approach to shooting. Even so, I’d love to see Venus Optics start adding electronics to its lenses – it just makes it quicker to check that you’ve set the desired aperture, and avoid inadvertent blurring from the IS system being set to the wrong focal length.
Focusing
With this being a manual lens, the quality of the focusing experience becomes critical to the results. Fortunately the focus ring is superb, with wonderfully smooth and well- damped rotation that enables precise setting, but means you’re unlikely to knock it out of position accidentally. For those who prefer to pre-set the focus, there’s a distance scale calibrated in feet and metres, and a clear depth- of-field scale with markings for f/5.6, f/11 and f/22.
Of course, with this being a 15mm wideangle, you have a certain margin for error with focusing anyway, especially when shooting stopped- down to the optimum apertures
‘ The lens barrel employs all-metal construction’
around f/8. Chances are you’ll still find you’ve taken more pictures in less-than-perfect focus compared to an AF lens, but you’ll only have operator error to blame.
Image quality
Ultimately with any lens, what we’re really interested in is the pictures it takes. Thankfully this is where the Laowa 15mm f/2 really shines. At its best, it gives wonderfully detailed images with minimal distortion and very low levels of chromatic aberration. The only obvious caveat is that the corners can look rather soft and murky at apertures much larger than f/4, although they sharpen up perfectly by the time you reach more normal working apertures of around f/8. But that’s the price you pay for combining such a wide view with a large maximum aperture, especially if you choose to examine 42.4MP image files at 100% magnification on your computer screen. However it might well be a price worth paying if working at f/2 is the only way to get the shot. And let’s be clear: no other lens can match this combination of large aperture and wide view, for any camera system.
In general, though, I found that used sensibly, the lens gave excellent results. It’s impressively resistant to flare, so you can frame with the sun in your shots and not have to worry too much about coloured streaking or ghosting. You’ll spot any problems in the viewfinder before you shoot anyway, so can adjust accordingly. The minimum focus distance of 15cm also enables unusual close- ups with expansive backgrounds.
One image- quality consequence of the lack of electronics is that the camera doesn’t know the lens’s optical characteristics, so can’t automatically correct lateral chromatic aberration. As a result, you’ll see green and magenta colour fringing around high- contrast edges at the corners of the frame, even in out- of- camera JPEG files with lens compensation enabled. But it’s a simple one- click fix in raw processing.