Laowa 35mm F0.95 Argus | Definitive Review

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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott, and I'm here today to give you my definitive review of the brand new Lowa 35 millimeter F0.95 lens
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and it is under their new Argus kind of premium brand here
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Obviously, any lens with an aperture of F0.95 is a rarity. Even more of a rarity, however, is such a lens designed for full frame
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We have seen over the last few years a trend where there have been quite a number of very large
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maximum aperture lenses released for platforms like APSC, where the engineering is easier to achieve
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When you move up to a larger sensor, like the full frame sensor, there are a lot of additional
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engineering challenges that come to produce a credible option at these huge maximum apertures
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So has Lawa managed to pull it off? Well, that's what we're here to discover in today's review
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Use code Dustin 15 for 15% off when you're ready to. to check out. I'm one of the, I think, probably few modern reviewers that has a chance to give a
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modern review of Canon's kind of legendary EF 50mm F1.0 L-USM lens. And that lens, I was able to spend
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some time with it. It was alone to me by a colleague, and I was able to spend time, kind of run
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through its paces. And at the end of the day, I found it for myself a little bit more of a
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novelty than a real optical instrument in that it wasn't really all that accessible. And at no point
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was it as sharp even as a very inexpensive 50mm F1.8. And so you really had to be intentional in the way
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that you use the lens to get the best out of it. It had low contrast. It never really developed a lot
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of peak sharpness. And so, and even the bouquet quality tended to be, in my mind, to be a little
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bit very busy and distinctive in a negative kind of way. But what it was was a showcase for
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Canon to show what they were capable of doing. And from that offshoot, they were able to produce
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more practical lenses like the EF 50mm F1.2L and even more so, kind of the direct inheritor of that
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body and design was the original EF 85 millimeter F1.2L. And so, you know, it was I think a platform
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that can use to advance their technology and to show what they were capable of doing
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In some ways, I think that's applicable here of Lawa, though it's a little bit of different reality for the Argus 35
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in that this is a fully manual everything lens. So it does remove a few of those constraints
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but there's the reality involved in engineering a lens that has a maximum aperture
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that is about one and a quarter stops faster than F1.4, which is the conventional, you know, kind of large maximum aperture for a 35 millimeter lens
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And so this has a huge maximum aperture, and it means that there are certain challenges that are
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incumbent to designing such a lens. But this is an intriguing lens that I think will really be even more so intriguing to certain
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people that shoot a certain kind of photography. And I hope to detail who I believe the target audience for the lens is
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First of all, let's dive in and let's take a closer look at the build and the handbook
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of the lens here. So the Lawa Argus 35 millimeter is like all Lawa lenses is really a beautifully made
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lens all meddling glass and in many ways reminds me of a classic Zice lens in terms of the
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quality of construction. That includes all metal everything that is here and a beautiful damping on
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things like the manual focus ring. The manual focus ring is actually really exceptional here
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It is buttery, smooth in operation, perfectly damped but also with a long enough focus for
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to give you a lot of precision. You'll see here there are some distance markings
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to help you with hyperfocus, and then also just markings in general
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Everything is etched in here into this kind of black satin, anodized finish
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Then you have a manual aperture ring that gives you a dual approach to controlling aperture
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and so you can have detents. They're not heavy detents, but you can feel them at the various stops
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throughout the range. You can also choose, however, to declick the aperture
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and just smoothly rack through the aperture itself. So before we talk about more positives, let's talk about some negative
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and that is that there are no electronic contacts here. There is also no kind of weather ceiling
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and so you're not going to get any kind of electronic information transmitted, and obviously you're not going to get weather sealing like you might with some other lens
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The lens hood itself is, as you can see, it is very shallow. It can be removed
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It bayonets into place, and so it gives you just a standard profile
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file without it attached. However, it is metal, but it is lightweight, and frankly, because it's not
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particularly deep in many situations, there's not a lot of reasons to remove it, other than if you
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were to take it off for storage, and obviously that will allow you to store the lens a little more
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flatly. Though I will note that it doesn't bayonet as precisely into place here. It seems to be fine
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and so you could store it like this, if you so desired, upside down. However, the
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Just the precision of the lens hood itself, it does feel a little bit flimsier than the lens itself, even though it is made of metal
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And also it much more precise bayoneting into place in the upright or fixed position One of these standout things here is that there is 15 aperture blades and the aperture is truly lovely in both operation and also in keeping retaining a circular shape as you can see
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So obviously that's going to make a very positive impact when you're stopping the lens down
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in order to get circular bouquet highlights. Now the lens is right under 77 millimeters in diameter which gives you a 72 millimeter front
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filter thread. It's 103 millimeters in overall length, and so it is just a little bit smaller than, say, the Canon 35 millimeter F1.4 L.2
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And so just slightly smaller in both of those dimensions, it weighs in at about 755 grams
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And again, that's about 5 grams lighter than what the Canon lens is
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And so even though you have very dense, all-metal construction, the lens does feel very substantial
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It feels very much like a Zeiss lens in hand, and that's due to all that metal and glass as a part of the construction
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It fuels very quality. There's nothing to complain about when it comes to what is here
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Any complaints I might have are more about what's missing here. And, you know, that would include any kind of electronics
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I understand that they're doing manual focus lens, but having some electronics certainly can make life simpler for a number of reasons
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One final thing worth noting that it's not a strength for the lens, and that is that the minimum focus distance is 50 centimeters, which is fairly long
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for a 35 millimeter lens and it gives you a very low 0.10 times magnification. And so unfortunately
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one of my favorite things to do with a 35 millimeter lens in terms of getting close and giving a
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different perspective, this lens isn't as good for because of that high minimum focus distance
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number. So as you can see, like other Lawa lenses, this is a beautifully made lens. It's, you know
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it's more about, the complaints are more about what's not here, but not really about anything
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that is here. What is here is really. beautifully made. I do think it's time for Lawa to move up to at least having some basic electronic
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communication as a part of their lenses that would make them a little bit more accessible. But at
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the same time, I do appreciate the fact that they are doing what they do very, very well. And
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frankly, this lens focuses as nicely as any of the Zeiss classic lenses that are kind of the gold
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standard to me for doing manual focus right. And so that manual focus ring is going to really make
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this an appealing lens for those that shoot video and are intrigued by being able to get the very
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large maximum aperture shots, you know, that are possible and those kind of creative
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artsy type looks that are allowed by, you know, such a large maximum aperture. In the same fashion
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I do really like the movement of the manual aperture ring and, of course, the ability to
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declick it. Again, makes it, you know, kind of doubly accessible and interesting to those
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that shoot video. So the big question, though, with any kind of large maximum aperture like this
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lens like this, is did they pull off the engineering to produce an optical performance
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that's actually useful rather than just a gimmick? Well, we're going to dive in and see if we can answer that question for you
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So there are some certain realities when you create an extreme optical instrument
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that's kind of outside of the spectrum of normal, which this lens is obviously with this large maximum aperture
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which is a little over a standard. stop larger than an F1.4 lens, which means you actually get a stop in about a sixth of additional
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light, more than twice as much light compared to an F1.4 aperture. But that does come with
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some optical challenges. And we're going to see some of those exhibit as we do this breakdown
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First of all, we do see that there is a bit of a pin cushion distortion here, which is a little bit
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different than what I often see with a 35 millimeter lens, more often barrel than pin. And
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cushion but we've got a bit of pin cushion here and a strong vignette as you can see
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so the distortion no big deal with a minus four I got a nice linear correction
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you know not perfect but pretty close to so no major issue there but vignette you
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see that I basically am almost off the charts I had to maximize up to a plus
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100 as far as I could move the slider and then slide the midpoint over you know I
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could pretty much go pretty close to all the way I tick off a little bit just
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just try to get a little bit more linear a result. And so at F0.95, there's definitely very, very heavy vignette
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and a mild amount of distortion. If we stop the lens down to about the F2 range
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I'm estimating that based on the shutter speed, we can see that the vignette continues to remain a factor
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It's not really much lighter, just mildly better than what it was before
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And so obviously that's something that isn't going to just very quickly clear up
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as you stop the lens down a little bit. That does become a real world factor, as you can see with this image at wide open
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There is very heavy vignette stopping on down, again to a little bit beyond F1.4, probably around F1.8 to F2 range
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You can see that the vignette is much lighter. And if I stop on down to like a landscape aperture, this is somewhere in F5.6 or F8 even, I think, by the shutter speed, probably around F2
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You can see that the vignette becomes much different of a factor. But there's one other thing that you may have noticed, and that is that the vignette is heavy enough at very white apertures that it does play a little bit of havoc with the automatic white balance
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I'm using a Canon EOS R5 for this test, and so you can see that it very much trends towards a cooling
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And I did note that somewhat, that I got kind of cool images, cool white balance, and that has a lot to do with the amount of vignette that is in the frame
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You eliminate that vignette, as you can see here, same scene, same lighting conditions, but a smaller aperture with less vignette, and you get a, you know, a fairly different white balance that is a much more accurate one than the one on the left
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A few other metrics to take a look at. Here we can see that fortunately there's not really much of an issue with lateral comatic aberrations
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I see very little fringing in these black and white transitions near the edge of the frame
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That's good news. Now on the less good news is that while I don see a massive amount of fringing here in this longitudinal chromatic aberration test you can see that there is quite a lot of spherical aberration and a kind of a bleeding effect at F0 which is not uncommon for lenses with this large and maximum aperture that does result in a heavily reduced amount of
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contrast that has little to do with typical chromatic aberrations and is more a byproduct of
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this really massive amount of a maximum aperture. Now, it is that spherical amount of aberrations
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and the lower contrast that will become a factor when we do our test
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test results here. So once again, we've got a 45 megapixel Canon EOS R5, you know, so very high
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resolution here. And you can see in the middle of the frame that resolution, even at 0.95
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is actually pretty good. You can see, however, the contrast is reduced. Stopping on down
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even to the F1.2 range does a significant amount of improving of that contrast in the center
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the frame. However, if you move off the center hardly at all, you can see a pretty severe drop off
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in the amount of contrast and then thus apparent resolution. And so you can see here that either at
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F0.95 or 1.2, that we don't really have a lot of acuity. And if we move into the corners
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corners, you can see the potential for resolution is there, but that very low acuity makes me feel
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like I'm looking at a small aperture rather than a large aperture, because this is kind of what you
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see as a result of diffraction. And so anyway, just a generalized loss of contrast
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You can see that there's actually the potential for resolution there into the corner
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but that low contrast really robs the acuity and the ability to render the fine details
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Stopping down to F1.4 has a significant improvement in contrast relative to wide open in the
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center of the frame. You can just see there's a lot more contrast, and thus, you know, just the resolution is showing up there
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So is it starting to hit the mid-frame yet? the answer is a somewhat but not significantly
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So you can see that there's definitely more contrast like in the writing here, a little bit more detail in the prime minister's face
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The shadows are getting a little bit darker, but we can see that there's still a lot to be desired
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as we move from the midframe, you know, towards the corner where you can see some improved contrast
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but the acuity while improving still has a ways to go. Now between F1.4 and F2
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we can see that the midframe is taking a pretty significant. significant leap forward, looking a lot better at this point. The corners are improving here
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but not to excellent levels as of yet. Stopping down from F2 to F2.8 moves us into very good territory
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here in the corner. Not quite excellent level, but very close to it. Going from F2.8 to F4
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however, takes us into truly excellent levels where resolution is looking really fantastic now
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all across the frame, obviously in that extreme corner, it looked great
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mid-frame looks fantastic, and center of the frame is just fabulous. Going from F4 to F5.6, kind of completes the picture in the corner
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to where everything now is pin sharp there in the corner, great contrast, great resolution
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So this translates into very strong real-world performance at landscape apertures, so even if we look off into the distance
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you can see, for example, in these bales of hay, just how pristine that they look
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The detail as it draws towards infinity looks fantastic. And then there's great contrast and detail
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and everything here from the road surface to all the various leaves there along the way
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Everything looks really crisp, really excellent. So in the real world at kind of close up distances here
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we can see the difference between F0.95 and F1.2 is pretty significant in the amount of detail that we get
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F1.2 with this composition, you know, just slightly off center, looks quite excellent at F1.2
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however, not nearly as excellent if we look at the F0.95 comparison
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Likewise, in this a little bit more distant subject here, we can see that the wide open result
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does show some fringing here and just kind of that general lower contrast, whereas stopping
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it on down to about F1.2, F1.4 makes a significant. difference in the amount of contrast that is there. So it's just kind of the nature of the lens
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design. Now our maximum magnification figure of only about 0.10 times is quite low, as you can see
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That is one of the disappointments to me of the lens because, to me, an advantage of having such a
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large maximum aperture is that you can get fairly close to a subject. If you can get close
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you can completely blur out a background. A little bit less potential for that because of the low
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minimum focus distance of about 50 centimeters and then of course a fairly low
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magnification level and again we see that really mark a difference that wide open you can see
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everything has very low contrast again the potential for resolution is there contrast is just really
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low we stop down to close to the f1.8 f2 range and you can see it looks fantastic and so just a
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dramatic difference by stopping it down a little bit so that's something to bear in mind if you
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get close to your subject and you, you know, you can play with the background a little bit
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and you want the sharpness. Stop down a little bit and it makes a significant difference
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Now your trade-off, obviously, for lower contrasts is that it tends to produce really soft
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creamy backgrounds. And so here, I've deliberately defocused my subject here in the foreground just a little bit
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And so with such a large maximum aperture, you do get bouquet circles
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In this case, we are looking at a branch of an evergreen that is, you know
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wet with raindrops. And so you can see there is a little bit of a tendency towards
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you know, a little bit maybe more of a circular, not circular shape, but an outlining as what I would like
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But you can just see the potential for some really lovely bouquet. It does start to clip a little bit towards the edges of the frame
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which I did see in some other shots as well. Now in this case, obviously I have actually focused on a similar type subject
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So you do see a little bit of chromatic aberration, but nothing extreme here
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But what you do see as a trade-off is quite a lovely and soft background
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And one of the thing that I going to explore a little bit more as we progress here towards the end is that Lawa colors tend to be a little bit muted for my taste And you can see here that we also gotten a little bit of that cooling to where it should be a little bit warmer than what it is
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So it gives it a slightly zice quality. Zice color tends to be a little bit cool sometimes
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but also a much richer than what we're seeing here. Now this image looks a little bit better
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but I have switched to a landscape type profile that is going to serve the purpose of
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deepening the saturation levels on the colors. What we can see, is that there's great amount of acuity here into the distance and at the distant shore
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Everything is sharp and crisp and you can see here towards the foreground. Everything also looks really fantastic
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So finally, let's explore flare a little bit. A serious weakness for huge glass like this tends to be that it's a little bit flare prone
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And as we can see, that's certainly the case here if you don't try to, you know, shoot to protect the lens
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The lens hood itself is really, really shallow, and so it's not doing a lot to actually block any kind of light
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It's probably there more for protection than anything. And as we can see here, it's done very little at wide aperture, maximum aperture here to stop flare
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And so there's lots of loss of contrast, along with some just kind of generalized kind of ghosting slash haze areas here
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Stopping on down a bit in this scene, it starts to produce a more pronounced ghosting pattern
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that will vary some depending upon where the sun is placed. And so, for example, in this video wide open
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you can see as I pan up and down that the amount of flare will really change relative to position
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And then in this stop-down video, you can see that ghosting pattern, flare pattern that is there
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that is increasingly pronounced depending upon the position of the sun in the frame
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Our final two images show that even at that large maximum aperture
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where it is really susceptible to flare. We can see that if the sun is, you know, not like really directly into the frame, but it's present
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you can see that there's a little bit, for example, on this left image, you can see a few
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little artifacts but that tend to have artistic value. Likewise, here on the right, it's a little bit of a lot of loss of contrast and a little
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bit of that kind of heavenly rays coming down. But I think it's a fairly artistic effect
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And so the moral of the story is, is that if you're careful and competent, position. You can either use this to your benefit or you can highlight it. It really depends on what you're looking for in a particular shot
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So as often the case with large maximum aperture lenses like this, they have kind of a split personality. And in some ways, I was quite reminded of my review of the Voightlander
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Nocton 40mm F1.2 lens. In that wide open, it had a, you know, a little bit more of a dreamy, as it sometimes euphemistically called profile, lower contrast
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and so textures, you know, bloom a little bit, but you have this beautiful bouquet quality
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and so it has a rendering that I discovered a lot of you actually really, really like
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And then, of course, the split nature of that was as you begin to stop the lens down
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contrast, you know, jumped in, and by the time you got to, like, landscape actors
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the lens was really razor sharp. And that is, in many ways, the way I'm reminded of in this particular lens
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and that it does have a sweet spot in the very middle of the frame that even at F is 0.95, you can get some crisp looking results out of it in that sweet spot
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right in the center of the frame. But even just a little bit off of that center axis and sharpness
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begins to plummet along with contrast. And it's as you stop the lens down to F2 and beyond
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that you really start to get a lot more contrast and sharpness. So the nice thing about that is that
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it does give you a couple of creative options, different ways that you can approach a seam, whether you
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want to prioritize kind of a, you know, a more dreamy, artsy type look, or if you want to stop
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down a little bit and go for a little bit more of a modern punch to your images. But there are
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many ways where this lens does have a somewhat kind of classic or retro rendering. And while I don't
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necessarily love the flatter colors that I see out of Lawa lenses that are a little bit more desaturated
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I do think that they offer certain creative potential for those that are going to do a lot of postwork
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either with stills or with their video. So at the end of the day, I think that this is a lens
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that will be intriguing to certain photographers, particularly when you consider the fact
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that while it's not inexpensive at about 900 US dollars, neither is it prohibitively expensive
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And so it is still accessible to a number of photographers that are interested in a beautifully made lens
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that's fully manual and with the plus sides, not just the negatives, but the upsides that come
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from having full manual control over a lens, to kind of enable your creative juices
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And so for the right kind of photographer, I think that this is going to be a very valuable lens to them
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It's not going to be a lens for everyone, however, and there are going to be a lot of photographers that are going to, number one, be put off by the fact
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that it's manual focus to begin with, though I will note that on mirrorless platforms
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that's a whole lot easier to deal with than what it was on DSLRs. But, you know, some people just don't want to be bothered
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with the manual focus. And, you know, the fact that it's a huge maximum aperture
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that's not going to be as sharp at F1.4 as, you know, some alternative options at F1.4 wide open
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If that's really your priority, then this is not going to be a lens for you
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However, if you're someone that has a kind of a different photography style
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this is a lens that is going to really ignite your creative process
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and so is well worthy of your consideration. I'm Dustin Abbott, and if you look in the description down below
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you can find my full text review and lots of photos accompanying that
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There's also an image gallery. If you want to check out more photos that I took with this lens during my review process
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beyond that, there are buying links. Though, again, this is a brand new, just announced lens
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So some of those links will take a little bit time to, you know, populate
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But just check back and they will be ready to go. And of course, beyond that, there's linkage to purchase my merchandise
25:26
follow me on social media, become a patron, sign up for my newsletter. And if you haven't already, please click that subscribe button right here on YouTube
25:33
Thanks for watching. Have a great day. And let the light in

Laowa 35mm F0.95 Argus | Definitive Review

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Laowa 35mm F0.95 Argus | Definitive Review

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