Laowa 15mm F2 compared to my Nikon 14-30 F4 - Z Mount Lenses
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- Опубликовано: 9 июл 2024
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Thanks for the comparison video, it was really helpful! I subscribed, keep up the good work!
fantastic review
Thanks for this review. I got this lens in December for my Sony A7RIV. I have tested for star photos from my house and I was pretty impressed. It seems like at F2 or F2.8 I can get enough light at 8-10 seconds at ISO 3200, 5000, 6400, etc. I do think the Laowa has some coma, but I don't worry about it. I also have the Rokinon 14mm f2.8 which has worked for me, but it is soft in some areas and the focusing is not easy. The Laowa is a sharp lens that I use during the day as well so unlike the Rokinon its not just for night skies. Looking forward to the Spring and some clear skies to really give it a good test.
Yeah I use to have the Rokinon as well and the corners were just way too soft for my liking so I had to sell it... I'm glad the Laowa performs just as good as my Nikon 14-30 corner to corner and I get the extra stops of light!! Thanks for sharing your settings with us!
5:22 How far away were you? With a 15mm lens i don't think you can focus on the edge and center unless the center and sides were different distances, but from this distance i think it's all the same. If you're within a few feet then definitely you can focus on either but you must be about 10 feet? I would think this particular image would be the same across.
Interesting review. Clear skies.
Thanks!
I have this for my eos r and I'm quite impressed. This is a great lens for astro and landscapes.
Awesome... I people kept recommending it to me when I picked up the Z7 so I'm glad I finally picked one up!
Exactly what I searched for, thanks for that superb video!
(your audio level was a little bit too hot 😉)
thanks for the review! i use the laowa since last year on my sony a7iii for shooting the milky way. when i bought it, there were not so many reviews out there. so good to see now, that you give it a thumb up 😁 finding the infinity focus is a bit of work (i will recheck for the corners, thanks for the advice!), but once you got it and remember where it is, you can simply move the focusring to that position and bam it works. my usual settings are iso3200, f2.8 with 13s. so far that worked out well all the time. i never really tried the f2.0, but thanks to your advice i look forward to try it out this year. i will try it on iceland end of march for northernlights, lets see how that goes...
Yeah, I took note of where I set my lens infinity line since the actual infinity mark on the Laowa is inaccurate. It's frustrating that lenses have infinity symbols on them but don't bother to make them accurate lol. Oh well, I'll just do one of my older tricks which is to take a picture of the best spot for F2 and F2.8 so I can easily reference that location at night. Glad to hear you are loving the lens!
@@Milkywaymike i did the same: my "real infinity" is in the middle of the left loop of the infinity symbol. i think. i hope. grr... ok i better check again next time 😁
Which one is best for video of real estate, maybe i should go with the nikon 20mm f1.8 for low light in real estate
I typically stop down to F4 for real estate video with my 20mm 1.8. 14-30 or 20mm would be best for video so you don’t need to worry about manual focus.
Now that 20 1.8 S is out would you still go this way. I have the 14-30 and am trying to decide my next step for my Z6
Steve Kunder I like having the 14-30 and 20mm combo. There are times I like to go ultra wide at 14mm and it’s less time consuming than taking a pano with a 20mm lens to achieve the same composition. If I only did tracked Milky Way photos I could get away with just the 14-30 but since I do MW panos and MW stacks for certain situations the 20 1.8 is crucial for low light. If you don’t want 2 lenses then consider the 14-24 2.8s when that becomes available. It will cost a pretty penny but if you are landscape and nightscape photographer it will be you most used lens
Thanks, I already have and love the 14- 30, so I think I will start saving for the 20 1.8.
How can a lender be out of focus at the edge but not at centre when you are beyond hyper focal distance for all subjects in the frame? The performance you appear to be witnessing (occasionally very soft couriers) is likely to be a result of the glass within the lens not being correctly aligned. I’d return it.
I took more tests and it was fine - sharp corner to corner even at 2.8... The problem is the lens has a sweet spot in which the entire frame was in focus. If you are slightly off of that sweet spot then you can run into that issue I had. If you looked at my star pictures in the video you can see that the laowa at 2.8 is virtually identical to my nikon 14mm F4 corner to corner.
My thoughts exactly
Do you like the laowa better than the samyang 14mm 2.8?
Absolutely! The Samyang / Rokinon 14 2.8 was really soft near the edges no matter how well you manually focused that lens at 2.8 and 3.2. Also it has a mustache distortion which messed up some of my horizons when shooting beaches at night. It was a pain in butt to try and straighten out a mustache curve distortion on a lens. I think LR now has a lens distortion fix for the samyang/rokinon so it is better, but I need my images sharp corner to corner so I'd rather dish out the extra money for a better quality lens like the Laowa 15 f2
Thanks for the review Mike. I'm a bit hesitant about buying the Laowa after seeing it. I have Nikon D9 and was thinking to sell my Nikon F-Mount 14-24 and replace it with Nikon Z Mount 14-24. Until I heard about Laowa, which is very attractively priced. But now I'm not so sure.
Spend the extra money on z mount 14-24 for the best sharpness. Most places offer interest free payment plans which is typically what I like to do to break up then large purchase with multiple payments. Also you can write off your camera expense if you sell you images or have a photography business
@@Milkywaymike Yes hard to beat Nikon 14-24 for sharpness. Thanks for the input
Laowa is excellent!
FO SHO'!
You know there is an infinity marker on the Laowa lens?🤷🏻♂️ I’m sure you do (every manual lens). It doesn’t work with every lens, but the Laowas are pretty consistently accurate with their infinity marking.
If the infinity mark is accurate then yes I agree that a person can use it. I highly recommend doing a sharpness test with the infinity mark vs using your lcd screen zoomed in and then manually focusing to see what gives you the sharpest results. I hate to speak in absolutes, but I’ve never had a lens in which the infinity mark was perfect. Definitely use it for a starting point and then make adjustments if need be. Cheers 🍻
Mike how is the 14-30 F4 for Milky way/Astro ...I have just bought this lens for Astro ..F4 is it fast enough
Hey Peter, you absolutely can use that lens for astro and I'm going to do a whole Milky Way tutorial with that lens in a couple months. The one downside is we have to crank up the ISO to 6400, 8000 or 10,000 to help keep the shutter around 10 or 13 seconds at 14mm(For Z7 users who want sharper stars) . If you have a Z6 you should get sharp stars around 15-20 seconds so ISO 4000-6400 should be ok). The good thing is, if you have Sequator or Starry landscape stacker you can clean up the sky quite nicely by stacking 5-10 photos. For the foreground I would probably use a remote trigger and do a longer exposure at a lower iso for better noise performance and sharper images.
I use to stop down my Nikon 14-24 2.8 to F3.2 and F4 all the time for better corner to corner sharpness. Especially if I use a star tracker then I always stopped down the lens to at least F4.
@@Milkywaymike I also have the Nikon 14-30 F4 I have a move shot move tracker...would the settings change for Milky Way photos..?
Excuse me. I don't understand English
Is the picture on the left is Nikon?
No, it’s a Loawa 15mm f2
@@Milkywaymike Thank you very much🙏
Mine is the 14-30 f4 IDEAL for Z7 ..The other is a compromise
Having a dedicated aperture ring is a luxury thing nit s bummer.
Center in focus while corner isnt, its called field curvature
Laeica wezlar I was never a fan of dedicated aperture rings... it’s a personal preference thing
The Sony version of the laowa is even smaller
This video proves what i have always claimed. Autofocus is more important than image quality. For this reason i took the a7iii, one of the most advanced autofocus camera second only to a9.
Can you auto focus Laowa 15mm F2 for Sony E-Mount on it?
good thing you're born in the right time
You actually couldn’t be more wrong when it concerns wide angle lenses. Unless you’re shooting something close to you, you shouldn’t be touching the focus ring at all. For perfect focus on that wall and the stars, he just had to set the focus marker to infinity on the barrel and it would be more accurate than any autofocus. The infinity marker on some lenses can be far off, but the Laowas are good. Optical quality is the main thing to look for in an ultra-wide. In fact there are a lot of reasons to turn autofocus off when you’re shooting wide (definitely for astro), especially with video. I shoot with the a7III as well. Good budget full frame camera.
I'm not going to come down to hard on you. Read your comment again, what do you mean when you say "auto focus is more important than image quality", that's like saying, 'throwing perfect spirals is more important than touchdowns. One is an action or effect, the other is a result. It would not matter if you threw perfect spirals if you're players were still catching the ball. What's important is that the ball is caught just as it's also important that your image is high in quality, anything less would be incomplete, failure, no touchdown. Whether you get a high quality image by way of auto focus or zooming in and setting your manual focus right, the objective is always a high quality image. Especially with a wide angle lens, auto focus is nearly pointless since most of your images are going to be in focus beyond a few feet, it's just all Infiniti. Now, if you're shooting a baseball game or most sports auto focus is a more useful tool, but even in sports photography you wouldn't say auto focus is more important image quality since image's quality is not a tool. Maybe i could have just said that. Anyway, good luck to you