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Venus Optics has announced a new lens that’s also the smallest in its lineup, the Laowa 10 mm f/2 Zero-D MFT (Micro Four Thirds) ultra wide-angle optic. Compact wide-angle combines super-wide field of view with a fast aperture.
While the new lens has the specs to rank among the best budget wide-angle lenses you can buy, it’s not actually the widest lens made by the manufacturer; that honor goes to the Laowa 4 mm f/2.8 Fisheye (although that lens, as the name suggests, is a circular fisheye lens rather than a pure wide-angle).
Still, with its equivalent full-frame focal length of 20 mm giving a 96-degree angle of view, this is still a ridiculously wide lens – and it has an almost as ridiculously wide aperture, at a very speedy f/2.
It’s also Laowa’s first lens to feature a CPU chip, motor and electronic contacts. While it remains a manual-focus optic, this means you can now adjust the aperture via the camera body, and focus magnification can be triggered when rotating the focus ring. And, of course, your metadata will now be recorded in the EXIF information of your files.
Micro Four Thirds
The lens is a genuinely pocket-sized prime, measuring a dinky 53 x 41 mm and weighing just 125 g. It has a 46 mm filter thread, enabling you to use it for all manner of subjects – and with a useful 120 mm minimum focusing distance, it becomes even more versatile.
The optical construction consists of 11 lens elements in seven groups, with five aperture blades. It’s also the second Micro Four Thirds lens to feature Laowa’s Zero-D technology, which we’ve found to be brilliant at controlling (if not entirely eliminating) distortion. The Laowa 10 mm f/2 Zero-D MFT is available direct from Venus Optics for $ 399,00 (around € 330,00).
