Laowa 'Argus' 35mm f/0.95 lens review with samples 

Just ordered mine last night. It will be here tomorrow. I love B&H return policy. So if I'm kinda like ehh.... I can just send it back. I got the Z mount version. I think $650 was a very good deal. I can't wait to try it out.

Yeah or the Sigma 35mm 1.2 which is even sharper even at f1.2 and has autofocus. Heavier and a bit more expensive though.

Yeah but manual fast lenses are also fun to use. Manual lenses sorta reinvigorated my enjoyment of photography.

@@StymyParsley It's fun but not so fun if the image quality is poor at the biggest aperture.

Yeah you need to compare them side by side to realize the actual trade off. Laowa is nealry 2x less in size especially if we compare it with the hood on.

I will be soon

Hi- I had the problem with the bottom part of the image being darker than the rest when using certain fast vintage lenses (which, like this Laowa, have no electronics) and after some digging online I found out that it was the camera, not the lens, that was causing it. By default, many mirrorless cameras shoot with an electronic front shutter curtain and a mechanical rear curtain, and under bright conditions with short exposure times, this can cause uneven exposure. When that occurs depends on the camera, but on my EOS RP it gets noticeable by 1/500s and it's pretty bad by 1/1000s. I gather that Sony cameras can have this problem too, but I'm not sure about others. Under sunny conditions, even some of my vintage Pentax or Industar lenses with f/2.8 apertures can produce this effect on my RP, to say nothing of f/1.8 or f/1.4 lenses. Among my non-electronic lenses, it's been consistent across different lenses and adapters- I've even gotten the effect in a test with no lens attached at all. That said, with an EF 50mm f/1.8 it's been much harder to reproduce; I'm not sure what the story is, there. There are three ways you can fix the problem... you can set the camera to use mechanical shutter for both curtains (not an option on my RP, but I think your R has the ability), you can use electronic shutter for both curtains (my RP will do this but not in the creative modes- again your R will probably do better here) or you can use filters (polarizer, ND, etc.) to block some of the light when shooting at wide apertures, to make the exposure times longer- and given my camera's limitations, this is my usual method. Failing that, I suppose you could take test shots against a white background at different shutter speeds and try to make an editing profile to correct the problem in post-production; this would allow you to correct shots already taken, of course, but I haven't tried this. In any event, this issue drove me crazy for a while until I stumbled across the cause and a solution, and I hope you can put one of these methods to good use.

@@matthewneleigh567 Thank you for this. I'm going to perform some experiments with that lens, and compare it to a similar fast lens that I use on my Olympus E-M1 to see what happens. I'll post my thoughts when I've looked into it. Cheers again.

@@yukonchris I look forward to hearing how it goes.

that was a myth falsely created by Leica and debunked long time ago by Sony ( and other testers ): the theoretical physical limit for FE mount is actually f/ 0,63.

You don't have long to wait

Oh yes. I need to contact Nikon about that one. Things are a little busy for me at the moment but it IS on my list of lenses to test :-)

I thought exactly that when it was about the Brightin Star 50/0.95 - double the money and get an RF 50 1.2 seems like a nice alternative all of a sudden :D

@@mihugong3153 Yeah, and even more so if you take into resell value.

Seconded. My eyes and ears are battling eachother in this video. I do like laowa especially their rectilinear wide angle lens, but not this one.

@@Durio_zibethinus And it's more expensive than the Z 35mm ONLY because it's f/0.95... 🥴