Venus Optics LAOWA 100 mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO review - Summary

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Venus Optics LAOWA 100 mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO

9 September 2019

Arkadiusz Olech

11. Summary

Pros:

solid, metal casing,
sensational image quality in the frame centre,
excellent image quality on the edge of the APS-C/DX sensor,
very good image quality on the edge of full frame,
negligible longitudinal chromatic aberration,
sensible correction of lateral chromatic aberration,
proper distortion correction,
moderate coma,
low astigmatism,
slight vignetting on the APS-C/DX sensor,
nice appearance of out-of-focus areas,
2:1 reproduction ratio.

Cons:

too high vignetting on full frame,
very weak performance against bright light,
faulty depth of field scale on the lens.

The summary of this lens's test will be a short one. You get brilliant optics and two mechanical slip-ups, one of them influencing optical performance. We mean of course the imperfect blackening; due to that fact the Laowa fares rather poorly against bright light. The DoF scale slip-up is pretty comical but you can function without it. Currently many producers don't put any scale on casings of their lenses so that issue might be kind of forgotten.

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The most important fact is such that the Laowa lens is able to provide sensationally sharp images up from the maximum relative aperture and is a unique optical instrument with 2:1 reproduction ratio which allows you to rise to levels unavailable to standard 1:1 macro devices. All of it you get for a reasonable price of about 450 USD. You have to admit such a price tag makes all slip-ups quite forgivable.