Viltrox AF 16mm F1.8 FE Definitive Review | Viltrox Levels Up

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built rocks has level up once again with their latest release that is the af 16 millimeter f1.8
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fe this is for sony full frame mirrorless cameras this is a full frame wide angle wide aperture prime
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lens that happens to have the features and the performance of a sony g master lens but at a
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fraction of the price. Find out why the Viltrox 16mm f1.8 should be at the top of your list if
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Viltrox has hit a whole new level for its features in a lens like this
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I noted that they had leveled up with their 75mm f1.2 for Fuji X-mount
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That was an APS-C specific lens, but this lens really surpasses what we saw even on the 75mm f1.2 Pro lens
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This doesn't carry a Pro badge, but it really feels, if anything, even more professional than what that lens did
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We have seen a whole new level of features here, including, well, for a while Viltrox has had an aperture ring
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and you continue to have that here with one-third stop to tense, the ability to put it all the way over into automatic mode
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But now we have a de-click option on the side of the barrel, which allows you to de-click that aperture and to do smooth aperture racking
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which obviously is going to be a key feature if you're wanting to do some video work with a lens like this
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And by the way, it works really well for video purposes, as we'll see a little bit later on
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They have added for the first time on one of their full frame lenses, we have an AF-MF switch here
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We also, below that, we have dual function buttons on here. So the top function button works something like the focus hold button on a Sony lens
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The bottom lens, however, is a preset button. And that gives you the ability to preset a couple of an AB focus position
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And so you can click and you can go right in between those two preset focus positions
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That's obviously going to be really useful if you're doing video work and you're wanting to pull between two preset subjects
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Or even if you're doing stills work and you want just to have a certain focus distance program in, a click of a button after you have set that and away you go
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But the headline feature here, of course, is the addition of the top mounted LCD screen
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This is a feature that I've only seen really on Zeiss baddest lenses on the mirrorless space here on Sony
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but I would say that they have actually one-upped what Zeiss did with theirs and that there's a whole
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lot more functionality built into this LCD screen. So you have a couple of things that are taking
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place, primary things. You have obviously the ability to see your focus distance both in a
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large scale in terms of just a digital readout but then also in an electronic distance scale
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along the top that helps you to let you know there. Along the bottom it gives you kind of a
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redundant showing of what your aperture setting is. Now I say redundant if you're using the aperture
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ring, which is right there. However, if you are using your aperture control from within the camera
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what that allows you to do is to see right from a top mounted what your actual aperture position is
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And so if you happen to have a camera like which most Sony, I don't think any Sony cameras do have
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a top mounted LCD screen, it allows you to see right there what your aperture value is. The other
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thing that's there is that it will light up showing you the function button when you're using that
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But then it also will show you the, allows you to use this screen to preset your focus distances
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And so you can see an actual marking of where your focus distance is
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Our two A, B focus points are on that. And it gives you more information on that
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By the way, you can set or reset those focus positions by long holding the second function button there on the bottom
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That allows you to preset that position. Now, I have only one complaint about this operation here
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And that is that the buttons could be a little bit better executed. They seem to require a little bit more force than what I like
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They're a little bit spongy feeling. And so as a byproduct, I find that it is a little bit difficult
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if you're doing a video focus pull back and forth. As you can see here, you can probably see a little bit of vibration introduced
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when I actually click that function button to change that because you have to push it a little bit harder than what you might otherwise like
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Also included now for the first time on one of their full frame lenses is weather sealing
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It starts with a uniquely colored gasket at the lens mount and there are internal seals as well. Now, I haven't seen a cutout for this yet because it's
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not been released. I'm reviewing a pre-release copy, but what I saw, if it's comparable to what
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I saw on the 75 millimeter F1.2, there are the pretty typical amount of weather seals
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gaskets at the key positions throughout. And I suspect that this is probably sealed in the same fashion. There is a metal focus ring that has a nice damping. It has about 210 degrees
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of rotation. And obviously the addition of having a distant scale on here, which is something you
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typically don't see on a mirrorless lens, allows you to have a little bit more repeatable results
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if you're doing manual focus pulls. So there definitely are some really useful video centric
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features on this particular lens. Now a Viltrox standard that they've had pretty much from the
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beginning is the inclusion of a USB port. In this case, it's USB-C that is located on the lens
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mount itself and so that allows you to do firmware updates right to the lens without any kind of
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docking station or anything like that. The lens itself is what I would call a medium-sized lens
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It is 85 millimeters in diameter that three and a quarter inches and it is 101 millimeters or a little over four inches in length It weighs in at 550 grams or about 19 ounces So it is very
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slightly larger and heavier than the Sony 14 millimeter F1.8 G master, though I did point out
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that lens as being incredibly unusually small for its size. This is still a moderately sized lens
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and it certainly is not at all heavy. In fact, I was able to use it no problem
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on a smaller gimbal like the DJI RS3 mini gimbal. And so it balanced on there just fine
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and I was able to use that. And you'll see some footage from that in just a moment. Now, one thing that I'm really impressed
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that they were able to pull off with a wide angle, wide aperture prime like this
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is that we do still have a flat front element. We can use traditional 77 millimeter
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filter threaded filters on here. And so that's very, very useful. I did some of these long exposure shots by putting on an ND1000 filter on there
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to allow me to get long exposures even in the middle of the day. So I really appreciate that as a part of the design, we don't have a bulbous front element
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and it's much simpler to actually filter this lens. There are nine aperture blades inside and Viltrox has gotten much better at retaining a circular shape on their aperture when it stopped down
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And it does have a pretty nice sunburst effect as well as we'll see during our image quality breakdown section
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Now, unfortunately, the one kind of lingering Viltrox negative that I'll highlight here once
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again is the fact that the minimum focus distance is not particularly close. It's 27 centimeters
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and the maximum magnification seems to be kind of the standard that all Viltrox lenses have. It's
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just 0.10 times, which is definitely on the low side, and so it makes it a little bit less useful
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for those close-up shots. The overall build here is very nice. It's mostly metals in the construction
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so it feels really good quality. The only thing that kind of stands out as being the exception
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is the lens hood itself, which is plastic and also it just feels a little bit cheap
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and also I find that it's not all that difficult for me to push past what should be the locking
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point here and to go a little bit beyond there. And so it's just not as engineered to the
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tolerances that I would prefer to see. Frankly, I'd prefer to see one of their metal lens hoods here
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but even if it's going to be plastic, if it was just a little bit more robust, that certainly
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would be appreciated. Overall, however, it's hard to complain about all of this for $549 US bucks
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That is a huge, huge bargain. Now, autofocus comes via Viltrox's lead screw type of STM or
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stepping focus motor. This is a really well-executed one here. Focus changes are nice and snappy
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as you can see here, even going from very close to infinity. It's not GM level fast
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with their multiple linear motors, but this is nice and snappy. I had zero issues in focusing
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out in the field. I found that IAF worked well, even working off of a gimbal. As we can see here
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I had no problem moving around and you can see that everything stayed nice and sticky on Nala's
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eye during that shot. Then when I did the focus pulls, you can see the focus pulls are nice and
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smooth here. No kind of pulsing or settling. Also, you'll note that there is next to no focus
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breathing there. Everything is really well executed on that front. I also found that focus
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pulls in video were typically very smooth, not quite as beautifully damped as the new Samyang
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VAF lenses. They're purposely designed for use for Cine, and so their damping is a little bit
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smoother. But even in those focus changes as I move around on the gimbal, overall, I think the
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focus changes are nice and smooth, nothing abrupt or disjointed. Also, when I did my hand test
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autofocus worked just fine there, moving from the hand to the eye. And again, because it's so smooth
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basically all you just see is that the focus changes with nothing abrupt or kind of jaggy
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feeling as it goes back and forth. I also did use it in a portrait setting. And while with a wide
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angle like this, it is the eye, it occupies too small a portion of the frame for a box to be on it
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At the end of the day, the autofocus results were all just fine. And so that's what matters most
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and I was able to get good precise results even when I was shooting at as shallow depth of field as possible
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So again, autofocus performance is actually really, really good here. So all of this is stacking up pretty well
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And if we look at the MTF for the lens, we see that it suggests a lens that is very sharp wide open
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and deadly sharp when stopped down with a very consistent performance all across the frame
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We're going to dive in and take a look and break down that optical performance, but I suspect you're going to be pleased with what you see as we do
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So let's start by taking a look at vignette and distortion. So as you can see here, there is not a lot of distortion for a wide-angle lens
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However, as we're going to see, the distortion in this area is just very slightly complex
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There is a fair amount of vignette, as we're going to see. And at this stage, I don't yet have a profile to correct, so all I have to go on is manual corrections
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So as you can see, kind of correcting for the distortion is a little bit complicated
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because there is a very, very tiny amount of barrel distortion. But if you try to correct the barrel distortion, it creates some pin cushion distortion
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And if you go the other direction, it just creates some barrel distortion curving out on these edges
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It's a non-linear type distortion. Fortunately, there's a very small amount. But this is going to be a lens that is, if you're going to correct it
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it's going to be better to do it with a profile rather than trying to do it manually. A fair amount of vignette here, a plus 80, so well over three stops
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certainly far from the worst that I've seen, but also not the best either. I will note, however
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that they've managed to get this wide aperture of f1.8 and retain a flat front element. Sometimes
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vignette can be reduced by doing a curved front element, and of course that eliminates using
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traditional filters. So I'm going to accept this compromise because it's not all that hard to
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correct this vignette. Now in real world applications, the distortion is low enough
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that it's really not going to be a factor. So here's a real world image here. You can see straight lines here and along the edges of the frame
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Really no issue to see there. Likewise, taking a look at a room, lots of straight lines here
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And you can see that there's no real bulging that's taking place in these lines
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And so most of the time, you're going to be able to get away with just not correcting the distortion at all Now in terms of chromatic aberrations they are pretty mild here You can see just the tiniest amount of fringing after the plane of focus there
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nothing significant at all. We can take a look at lateral chromatic aberration near the edge of the
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frame, and we can see it if we punch into the sides here that there's really just not much of
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anything to see, not really a factor here. So overall chromatic aberration, not an issue. So
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will take a look here now at our resolution this is a 50 megapixel sony alpha one sensor and i'm
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showing you these results at 200 magnification you can see even at that very high magnification
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in the center of the frame this lens is extremely sharp with very high contrast everything looks
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really fantastic if we move towards the mid frame mid frame is not quite as sharp but it's still at
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a very high level even wide open and popping down here into the corner we can see that sharpness
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and contrast is good even right into the corner. Now to put this into perspective, I've got for
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comparison purposes the much more expensive Sony FE 14mm f1.8 G Master. And so we can see here that
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looking here at the mid frame that the Viltrox is the sharper of the two lenses. That's true also
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here. We look down towards the corner. The corners are a little bit closer, but the Viltrox still
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looks, I would say, just a little bit better even into the corners. Over here on this side
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we can see it looks better there. And looking over here towards the queen, we can see that again
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it's the Viltrox that stands out as being the stronger lens up into this other corner as well
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And we can just see that Viltrox is just holding up a little bit more consistently. And we can also
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see obviously not quite the same comparison points here, but we can see also at the same time that
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the Viltrox is showing good centering and a good strong performance. So for some perspective in
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real world shooting, here we have basically the same shot at f1.8 and then at f5.6. And we can see
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here that if we go in towards the center of the frame, that in the center of the frame, there's
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really not much difference between the two lenses at f1.8 or at a landscape aperture of f5.6. We pan
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over towards the side of the frame, we can see that here that contrast is holding off better
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towards the edge of the frame at f5.6, but we can see overall that performance is really quite good
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even at f1.8. Perfectly usable image you can get wide open at f1.8. So of course that does give you
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some flexibility in playing with depth of field here. So for example, in this shot, the first shot
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I put the lighthouse here in focus and you can see here that in the second shot, it is
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completely out of focus. And then in the second shot, I put the foreground branches in focus
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And so it just allows me to really kind of change up the result that I'm going for in that by playing
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with the depth of field. Now, if we stop the lens on down, we can see that F2 is looking just a
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little bit sharper, a little bit better contrast. F2.8 is more contrasty still. And that becomes
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more obvious as you go towards the edge of the frame. You can see here that, you know, F2 looks
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good but f 2.8 looks better and down into the edge of the frame we can just see that at f 2.8 we've
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made a real strong leap forward in terms of edge performance and that's going to be true you know
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regardless of what edge we look at essentially that over here also looking sharper as well
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getting very crisp even on a 50 megapixel sensor right off into the corner of the frame
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now if we check back in with the sony g master at f 2.8 we can see here looking at the mid frame
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that, you know, again, they're closer, but I would say that the Viltrox still looks a little bit better
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down into the corner of the frame. Again, it's close, but I would still lean Viltrox looking in this area
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Again, it's very close, but Viltrox is probably just a little bit more consistent there
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in terms of the performance delivering. And definitely over on this side, I would favor Viltrox and up into this corner
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Both of them look good, but again, I think the Viltrox is just, As you can see here, it's just delivering a little bit stronger performance
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Now to throw up just one more point of comparison, the Sony 12-24mm f2.8 G Master zoom lens
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obviously a very expensive lens by comparison. However, we can see that the zoom is just really incredible here at 16mm f2.8
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and it's definitely the sharper of the two there in that mid-frame. As we look here, very clearly sharper
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and down into the corner it is not as strong there the Viltrox has has the edge in the in the corner
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of the frame but in other spots I definitely would say the the G Master zoom is sharper but
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put in comparison there we definitely can see that the Viltrox is really holding its own for being at
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such a low price point by comparison now if we look at f4 and then f5.6 we can see that in the
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center of the frame we've pretty much maxed out what we're going to see not a big improvement
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there even from what we've seen before. In the middle of the frame, however, we can see ongoing improvement at f4 and then even
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more so at f5.6. And down into the edge of the frame, those corners are looking just really fantastic
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Very crisp, very sharp by this point. And so that's really obviously very encouraging to see a really strong performance
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That makes this lens a really great one for high resolution bodies because it means you
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can be out and you can shoot a wide scene like this
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You can zoom into 100% level here and you've got great detail on your subject
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And you could deeply crop into an image like this. And because the lens is resolving so well, still have a lot of detail for other type uses that would hold up fine for printing or sharing on social media, etc, etc
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Now our minimum aperture here is f22. As per usual, however, diffraction is robbing a lot of your sharpness and contrast away
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and so I would avoid shooting at that smaller aperture. Usually about f11 is about the limit
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of what I recommend going on a high resolution body Now to take a look at a few other things we already noted that the maximum magnification is not super high here On the positive note you can see that contrast and detail are really really sharp up close And so and the plane of focus is not too
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bad for a wide angle lens. You can see we don't drop off to like complete softness. And over here
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up in the corner, we can see that it still looks quite good. And so it is fairly useful, even though
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the magnification level is not high. And so as a byproduct, you are able to get some blurred out
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backgrounds between getting close to the subject and then using that f1.8 aperture. And so in this
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case, we've got, you know, really nice detail on the subject. And then we have a fairly decent
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defocus background, maybe a little bit more outlining in some of the bokeh circles than
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what I would like, but really not a bad performance. Here, the outlining is a little
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less obvious and you know as we can see detail is good on our subject here and then we have a
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fairly blurred out background and then you know again having that high resolution here's you can
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see again the the book has a little bit busy there too much outlining but the ability to deeply crop
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as i can do here and still hold up with a lot of detail you know makes for a little bit more
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compressed looking background a few more looks here i thought this image actually looked pretty
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good for wide angle and up close and another from this kind of sequence and again yeah more outlining
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than what i would like but bokeh quality not bad for a wide angle lens often that's not a strength
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for wide angle lenses and so all things considered i think this is fairly decent in its performance
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so also interesting is in times past i felt like viltrox color was not really all that fantastic
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but their optical glass has very clearly improved and so what we can see here is that i've shot this
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in this sequence side by side with the new Sony 50mm f1.4 G Master lens
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And you can see that obviously there's a tremendous difference in the framing between these two extremes
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But in terms of the overall color, the color is actually quite consistent between the two
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And so we can see that obviously it's a whole lot creamier on the G Master
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This is a little bit jittery the way that it falls in that mid frame. But as far as the actual colors here, the colors look quite similar between the two lenses
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which just, again, is something that I felt in general that colors just looked pretty good out of the lens
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which is progress. Here's another example here where just the overall colors
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and obviously the lens has beautiful contrast and beautiful resolution. So a lot of great things happening there
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But I also felt like the overall colors here look quite nice
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another aspect of wide angle lens design that's important is flare resistance now we can see here
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that the flare is at the wide apertures is is pretty well contained there's a little bit more
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to be seen you can see just down here in this effect when you're shooting at a closed down
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aperture this is f11 here although i will say that the sunburst looks quite nice again here with it
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that a wide angle with this close up to the leaf, bright sun coming through here
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and yet you can see just a little bit of a kind of a prismatic effect there
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that is fairly artistic, and overall flare resistance is quite good. One other shot to show you here, and that is the sun right in the frame in this shot
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and you can see there's this little bit of a kind of artistic effect here
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not bad at all, and certainly not destructive, no ugly blobs that are ruining the image
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Now, if we pan back and forth, you can see that, as always, there are points that are better than others
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But in general, I would say that flare resistance is not bad here for a wide-angle lens
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One final thing that's interesting to look at is the coma performance. A wide-angle lens like this with a wide maximum aperture immediately becomes an option for shooting the night sky or cityscapes at night
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You can see in the center of the frame, the lens is very sharp. And so even at f1.8, it has really crisp star points that aren't ruined by chromatic aberrations
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And as I pan off towards the side, you can see a little bit of some coma deformation
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but it is really minimized. And so there is nothing severe here, nothing that I think is going to be destructive for this
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This is actually quite a good option for shooting the night sky for the reasons mentioned
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and the fact that coma is quite low. So at a price point of 550 US dollars, this lens is, in my opinion, a home run for Viltrox
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It's hard to imagine getting more bang for your buck in a wide angle, wide aperture prime like
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this. It's delivering high optical performance, has very good autofocus performance. It's feature
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rich. It has a beautiful build. It's pretty much checking all the boxes at this point
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And the fact that they retained a reasonable size and the ability to use traditional filters
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As I said, that's another few boxes that are checked for me. I'm actually looking forward to using this as my primary wide-angle prime lens
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I just think that they have done a great job with it. I'm happy now with Viltrox colors in a way that I used to not be
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I think that they have really upped their game on basically every level. And if this is what we can expect from Viltrox moving ahead
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I am very excited to have them as a player in the lens maker market
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Here's hoping that this lens also comes to other mounts in the future. Nikon Z and hopefully, hopefully Canon RF in the future. It really is a beautifully executed lens
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And I can understand a company like Canon wanting to keep a lens like this way
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It's going to be tough to compete with at that price point. I'm Dustin Abbott. And if you look
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in the description down below, you can find linkage to my full text review, also to an image
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gallery. Obviously this lens is just coming to market if you're watching on the day of release
24:34
of this review. And so if you'll just stay tuned, it should be available before too long through
24:39
the buying links below, and I appreciate it as always if you use those. You can also find
24:43
links there to follow myself or Craig on social media to become a patron, to sign up for my
24:47
newsletter, to get channel merchandise, and if you haven't already, please like and subscribe
24:51
Thanks for watching. Have a great day, and let the light in

Viltrox AF 16mm F1.8 FE Definitive Review | Viltrox Levels Up

Dustin Abbott

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Viltrox AF 16mm F1.8 FE Definitive Review | Viltrox Levels Up

Dustin Abbott