Interesting E mount option. The review pics look fine except for the vignetting. I’d personally rather use my small/light Zony 35/2.8 (which is a bargain on the B&S board), but hopefully this new pancake 28 will be fun for others.
joelRichards wrote:
I added my name to the Indiegogo, but I do wish they'd added an aperture system and filter threads. I'd have happily compromised a few mm's for those "innovations"!
I don’t need filter thread though an aperture control would be helpful. I bet viltrox is is going to sell huge numbers of this lens at this price. Honestly, it is brilliant on their part. Strip everything out, make it as cheap, light and small as possible…
I thought some phone lens can control aperture too. To me, you can throw away everything but put in af and aperture control…. That will be ideal.
I'm here to help.
The score of 4 (out of 10, not 5) should get the idea across. Even for $100, maybe I was expecting a little more optically. Had a cursory interest in this lens, but not anymore (besides, I already have way too many lenses).
wind30 wrote:
I don’t need filter thread though an aperture control would be helpful. I bet viltrox is is going to sell huge numbers of this lens at this price. Honestly, it is brilliant on their part. Strip everything out, make it as cheap, light and small as possible…
I thought some phone lens can control aperture too. To me, you can throw away everything but put in af and aperture control…. That will be ideal.
I don't disagree, but looking at the MTF it could be a sleeper hit for IQ. It could be a great hiking lens but for landscapes I'd want to stop it down and put on a polarizer. As-is, it will probably be a killer snapshot, family, and street lens.
Ross Martin wrote:
Interesting E mount option. The review pics look fine except for the vignetting. I’d personally rather use my small/light Zony 35/2.8 (which is a bargain on the B&S board), but hopefully this new pancake 28 will be fun for others.
Would an A7C still be pocketable with the Zony 35 on it?
With the Viltrox on it'd fit in my pants pocket comfortably.
I bought one on impulse thinking it would be perfect on my recently acquired A6300. The lens was delivered two days ago:
A perfect, pocketable package.
I've only had the opportunity to test drive the lens on two short afternoon dog walks. Under decent lighting conditions, the first few images looked good. For example:
However, when the sun was just outside of the frame, I was getting this:
This one came with a rainbow in addition to the spots:
Most influencers/reviewers have noted the propensity of the lens to flare but I find it hard to believe what I'm seeing in my test shots is normal behavior.
Time and weather permitting, I'll try the lens on my A7R5 and see if I can duplicate the artifacts. Those spots in the frame are worrisome.
tetrode wrote:
Most influencers/reviewers have noted the propensity of the lens to flare but I find it hard to believe what I'm seeing in my test shots is normal behavior.
I do not think this lens has like great flare resistance, but in my testing I surely haven't seen that bad and I had two samples of it.
The feature I find the most appealing is that lever operating the sliding lens cap. That really suites the design philosophy and related use cases of this lens. I wish I had that on my RF 28mm f/2.8 stm (which has the terrible habit of taking it's sweet time to retract before you can mount that cap after shooting).
I think the weak flair resistance is a problem. That's not gonna help you when doing street. I would rather pay twice the price to get that problem solved.
Colour cast in the corners, vignetting, fixed f/4.5, that's all fine, as it's not hurting you that hard for most intended use cases, and the addition of AF is huge of course. But the weak flair resistance makes me accept the extra size and weight of the FE 28-60mm. For me a camera never fits in a jeans pocket anyway, and coat pockets will accommodate the 28-60mm just fine. You can spend some time on picking the right lens, but sometimes it's more about picking the right coat imo. As always, your milage may vary.
Viltrox Japan also announced via Twitter that this lens is now available to buy in Japan and it seems to be sold by a Chinese intermediary "JYphoto-JP" through Amazon JP at the moment.
They have a White version of the lens in addition to the Black one but White is currently unavailable.
As the price was quite good even with Japanese tax included (13300 JPY, about 89 USD currently), I also ordered one to give it a try as 28mm is one of my very favorite focal lengths and there are still not enough native options in E-mount. I already have a few tiny MS-Optics 28mm and 24mm lenses that I like for similar usage (but with MF & controllable apertures) although they require an adapter from M to E.
though it's 20$ difference in the end 
...
