I do own the Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 FE lens and I am impressed by it’s performance considering it costs a third of similar competition lenses. So I am very intrigued about what’s coming next and indeed sounds the company is on fire and plans some BIG stuff!
Richard Wong visited the Viltrox headquarter and he got some info about what’s coming next:
1) These three lenses will be big and from what I understood FF lenses. They will be announced by end 2023:
- 22-220mm cine lens (manual focusing)
- 30-300mm cine lens (manual focusing)
- 42-420mm cine lens (manual focusing)
2) Very affordable 20mm pancake around $150. But performance will be high. More smaller lenses will be coming in future:
- 20mm f/4.5 pancake autofocus Full Frame lens
3) New LAB series will launch soon:
- 135mm f/1.8 autofocus Full Frame E-mount lens (First of the LAB series)
- 24/35/50mm f/1.4 autofocus Full Frame E-mount LAB lenses coming later
The LAB series will be something like the OTUS line at Zeiss. The optical performance will be higher than the PRO series of Viltrox. I do love the idea of a high quality lens that does cost MUCH less than Sony. But I do hope that they will also work on lenses that aren’t the usual focal length. At the moment we have SIXTYONE 50mm lenses (source BHphoto)…do we really need another 50mm f/1.4?
Viltrox, Tamron, Sigma, give us some f/2.0 or f/1.8 zooms, some nice compact f/2.0 and fast f/1.2 primes. That would be something or not?