Laowa 10mm f/4 Pancake Lens Reviews

Venus Optics has just announced the new Laowa 10mm f/4 rectilinear pancake lens for APS-C mirrorless cameras.

Down below are a couple of reviews about it.

Laowa 10mm F4: Venus Optics (fastest shipping option) / BHphoto / AmazonUS / Adorama

Christopher Frost says:

normally these tiny lenses are pretty trashy
price is not cheap
130g weight
manual focus and manual aperture control
small, tough and metal
at f/4 it looks nice sharp in the middle but average contrast
good news: sharpness continues right into the corners
only the very edges look a bit soft and are darker (vignetting)
at f/5.6 the very edges have just a bit more sharpness and contrast, but not much more corner brightness
image quality stays the same all the way down to f/11
f/16 the image softens quite significantly from the effect of diffraction
overall impressively sharp performance from middle to corners
lens distortion is very low
huge amount of vignetting
at f/8 and f/11 they begin to brighten, but not that much
close up image quality (minimum focus distance is 10cm):
– at f/4 image is softer with slightly lower contrast
– at f/5.6 just a small improvement

Dylan Goldby (tested on Fujifilm X-T3)

image quality is good, but not what he would call great
it’s so tiny, some concessions have to be made
center sharpness is OK at f/4
gets pretty good at f/8 and f/11
corners are always a lit behind the center in terms of sharpness
quite significant vignetting that never really goes away. Easy to fix in post
a bit of chromatic aberration and choma wide open, but at f/5.6 all fixed
5 blade aperture ring for big, defined sunstars
Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D is $200 more expensive
Laowa 9mm f/2.8 Zero-D offers slightly better image quality overall
Laowa 10mmF4 feels better build and refined
it’s not Laowa’s best lens, but the appeal is decent to good image quality in a very small package

Laowa 10mm F4: Venus Optics (fastest shipping option) / BHphoto / AmazonUS / Adorama