So, I'm still on the fence between the Loawa 9mm and 11mm.
I spent a couple hours shooting with the 9mm yesterday and enjoyed it.
One of my biggest dislikes is the 3 stop vignette. No problem shooting outside at ISO100, but when I start at ISO400 and up, the corners are pretty bad after the profile correction.
I did make a closed-cell foam 'adapter' to use my Wonderpana 145mm filter holder, which actually worked pretty well. But again, it ain't travel friendly.
Can someone with more ultra-wide angle experience than me, which is basically everyone that ever used an ultra-wide lens, tell me what is faulty in the logic of keeping the 9mm and most often shooting with the intent of cropping to 10mm or 11mm to soften the blow of the vignette? (Other than the loss of megapixels, which I get.)
It seems that would also eliminate the worst of the corner smear and when(if?) I ever really need 9mm, I have it.
Well your not going to rid yourself of the vignettes on any 9,10,11,12 mm lenses. That's just physically impossible. Sure some lenses maybe less but unless it's the size of a bowling ball your stuck with it. So either you use a lens profile or in post use a vignetting tool in your raw processor.
Also be aware it's not just cropping between a 9mm and a 12mm either it's the actual lens distortion, prospective that gets more dramatic with wider focal lengths and honestly your going to get some smearing on a 9mm lens. Your fighting physics here. Your dealing with the whacky world of super wides. Not for the faint hearted.
GMPhotography wrote:
Well your not going to rid yourself of the vignettes on any 9,10,11,12 mm lenses. That's just physically impossible. Sure some lenses maybe less but unless it's the size of a bowling ball your stuck with it. So either you use a lens profile or in post use a vignetting tool in your raw processor.
Also be aware it's not just cropping between a 9mm and a 12mm either it's the actual lens distortion, prospective that gets more dramatic with wider focal lengths and honestly your going to get some smearing on a 9mm lens. Your fighting physics here. Your dealing with the whacky world of super wides. Not for the faint hearted. ...Show more →
We are pretty spoiled, aren't we, with all these high expectations! A 10mm (+/-) lens is an extraordinary thing to have, and it's impressive that there are options available to us that are as good as these.
Nevertheless, there is a 10mm lens with much lower vignetting - the Samyang XP (a.k.a. Rokinon SP) 10mm f/3.5.
It weighs over 700 grams and it's for Canon EF mount. But it adapts well with a quality adapter like the MC-11. Though, of course, that adapter adds yet more weight.
"The Samyang XP 10 mm f/3.5 clearly suffers from vignetting at full aperture. We often like a bit of it, but in many cases 1.8 stops at full aperture is just a bit too much to not correct. Stopping down reduces the vignetting slightly but does not eliminate it completely. Even at f/8, it’s slightly more than a stop. That’s a lot less than the 1.8 stops that you get at full aperture, but still (just) visible." https://www.camerastuffreview.com/en/review-samyang-xp-10mm/
I think Camerastuff were being overly critical. All competing lens designs have one-and-a-half to two stops more vignetting at their maximum apertures, and don't improve, almost at all, upon stopping down. Compared to that (and also in absolute terms!) a single stop of vignette at f/8 is OK. Whereas 2 and half or 3 stops of vignette at f/8 can be a real nuisance. It's an important difference.
Plus, it starts out at a considerably wider aperture. f/3.5. And even at that unusually big aperture for such a lens design, it vignettes less than the competition does at practially all, narrower, apertures. At like-for-like apertures vs other lenses, the advantage increases.
The Samyang does have some kind of green colour cast in the corners, like the Laowas do. I don't know whose colour cast is stronger, Samyang's or Laowa's - nobody has compared directly. But if you've got less vignetting, your RAW file arguably has more flexibility to be goofed around with to fix such colour casts harmlessly.
I've been dithering a lot over whether to go for the bulk, and image quality, of the Samyang, vs. the extraordinary portability and performance-per-pound of the Laowa designs. They'll each be annoying in their own way - the intense vignette will bother me on the one, the weight will bother me on the other.
We are spoiled no question but also I think some are very unrealistic. Kind why I say you need to learn more. Simple things like what do you expect a 85 1.4 should be. Da 49mm filter/ 300 gram. Well come on that will never happen but we do see it everyday. Now over the years and there are a lot we really did not have these type of options at all. Yea Nikon has a 14mm what 20 years ago but it kinda sucked too. Not today a CV 15 can turn heads at 600 bucks.
I would love to have all these lenses to play around with. I love super wides
Have to look at that Samyang but green color casts in corners tell me it maybe more a sensor issue with that lens overall but it's coming from the lens design if that makes sense
more_freedom wrote:
Has anyone been able to make a comparison between the Voigtlander 12mm and the Laowa 11mm?
I did a quick test at infinity and aside from the different FL, they are very similar at center, mid and extreme corners in terms of resolution and contrast. I did find the Laowa having lower lateral CA while the Voigt flare resistance was stronger.
Fred Miranda wrote:
I did a quick test at infinity and aside from the different FL, they are very similar at center, mid and extreme corners in terms of resolution and contrast. I did find the Laowa having lower lateral CA while the Voigt flare resistance was stronger.
I'll try and squeeze this out of the B&H search tool, but thought I'd lean on the expertise here and ask.. what is the widest prime in FE mount that one can get that will also use standard filter systems like the Lee foundation kit, etc.. ?
I have chosen the expedient of the Laowa 9mm F5.6 and the a7r IV so I can, if need be, crop away some vignetting and/or other optical inconsistencies at the edge of the frame to yield an 11-13mm FL.
Well, I finally gave this lens (the 11/4.5) a try as it went on sale and thus B&H also discounted their used copies. My goodness, the copy I got stayed disappointingly soft on the edges even stopped down to F/16 (shot on a Z7). In fact it was so poor that defishing a TTArtisans 11/2.8 FE to create a 11mm rectilinear image had the defished results easily outperforming the Laowa despite the heavy distortion correction required. I suppose it is possible I had a bum copy, but it didn't appear to have gross decentering or an obvious "tell" of a defective copy. I noticed a few reviews to show fairly miserable corners that never sharpen up but it is possible my copy was worse than that.
It is a cute little lens to be sure, nice and compact enough that you'd actually bring it with you. The edge/corner performance was just too poor for me. I've usually got a 14-30/4S with me and for most things I shoot just doing a single row pano at 14 would give me the option of a 11mm rectilinear (or a 9mm for that matter) output for zero dollars and zero weight. I like the idea of being able to compose with the 11/4.5 but the IQ compromise seems severe if you care about anything beyond the middle portion of the frame. The TTArtisans 11/2.8 in the end is more flexible providing a number of projection choices in post and actually giving better results even defished rectilinear (and for the record, despite the TTArtisans calling itself an 11mm fisheye it is actually a 15mm equidistant projection fisheye which handily enough gives one the ability to defish to just about 11mm).
