Compact, light, wide
The engineers at Laowa certainly had no ambition to create a perfect lens when they designed this super wide and compact lens. Instead, they wanted to create a small, light and budget friendly lens, that would allow you to go super wide without breaking the bank or your back. When assessing this lens, I think it is important to measure the success based on how well they succeeded with their ambition, rather than the obvious drawbacks this lens also has.
This lens was announced 12th of November 2024 and at that point had a retail price around 400 USD. Laowa kindly sent me this lens for review, but has had no influence on the content here.
The promise on the tin: wide angle, low distortion, compact and full frame.
Compact
The Laowa FF 15mm F5.0 Cookie Lens is indeed a cookie! Mounted on my Nikon Z6ii it almost looks a bit lost. And the 160 grams it adds to the weight of the 700 gram camera indeed makes it a lightweight combo!
F5.0
With an aperture range of F5 to F22 it is not the fastes of lenses, but I doubt you want to shoot razor thin depth of field with this lens. As is often the case with wide lenses, you can go crazy close to your subject – 0.12cm!
The aperture blades are straight! Yes, yes, yes! This will give some bokeh balls that are edgy, unless you shoot wide open, but the big benefit is that your sunstars will be beautifully cut out. In my book, sunstars are more important that bokeh balls, but of course your milage may vary.
Minimalist
The Laowa FF 15mm lens has no electronics whatsoever. No CPU contacts, no auto focus, nothing. It is really back to basics – metal and glass all the way.
You need to be disciplined when it comes to setting up the lens in the camera as the camera has no idea what lens is being mounted. Especially if you – like me – sometimes sort and filter your images based on the focal length. On the Nikon you have to configure a non-CPU lens and make sure to select it before shooting.
You may think that the lack of auto focus is a big drawback, but when you work with a lens this wide, you probably don’t want to capture birds in flight or a football player on the move. Landscapes and architecture has a tendency to be more still and you can take your time to get the focus right. Assisted by the focus peak highlights in the camera, I find manual focus to be a breeze.
The Laowa FF 15mm lens has the aperture ring closest to the front of the lens and the focus ring towards the camera. This is opposite of what I am used to, so it took a little while to familiarize myself with this setup. Also, the focus is operated via a little handle sitting on the focus ring, and the throw is very short – only 70-80 degrees. Had this been a macro lens or a portrait lens, I would have considered this to be too short, but for landscapes and architecture, this will be less of an issue.
Image quality
You can find a small sample of test shots using this link to Flickr.
Both sharpness and contrast with this lens is good. The classic stress test is shooting wide open (F5) and looking at the corners of the image. You will notice that both contrast and sharpness drops significantly when you shoot wide open, but most lenses act the same way. And most worry about the center sharpness rather than the corners, although architecture photography may be the exception to that rule. But in my book, this lens is approved when it comes to sharpness and contrast.
Although the tin promises “low distortion”, I do notice some distortion setting in when shooting tiles in my bathroom. If you are to shoot architecture with this lens, you need to make sure this will not be a problem for you.
The lens produces a rather dramatic vignetting, but you can fix this in post, so for me that is less of an issue.
The green colour of the flare shows the dampening at work. Also notice the heavy vignetting (darkening of the corners).The flare is dampened via coating on the glass and it gives the well known green colouring of the light. Some photographers are fans of flare while others absolutely want to avoid it, so when it comes to flare dampening we are in personal preference territory. I have seen better dampening of the flare than what this lens has, but it is clearly having a reducing effect on the strength of the flare.
As noted earlier, I absolutely love the simple and sharp sunstars the lens produces and I wish more lens producers would go with straight blades and prioritise the sunstars over the bokeh.
Summary
Clearly this is a highly specialised lens where low weight and low price has been prioritised by the lens designers. The vignetting is heavy and I cannot ignore the distortion when shooting wide open either. But if these are not issues for you and you are comfortable with manual focus, this lens may be the budget friendly wide lens you have been looking for. For me, I find that the price tag is a notch too high to justify the otherwise fun lens that probably many will enjoy as a light companion in their backpack.
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- Where this lens excels:
- Super wide
- Low weight (160 gr)
- Small size
- Sunstars
- Full frame
- Points to notice:
- No CPU contacts
- Manual focus
- Some distortion
- Heavy vignetting
- Flare control is not top of shelf
- Bokeh stopped down is “boxy”
- Not a super fast lens
- Corners are soft when shooting wide open
- Short focus throw
- Where this lens excels:
Product page link
https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-15mm-f-5-cookie-ff/
Further reading
Review: Nikon 35mm f/1.8 S lens (for the Nikon Z-mount, full frame)
Review: Viltrox AF 33mm f/1.4 APS-C lens for the Nikon Z-mount