Venus Optics has added another specialty lens to their Laowa line, an ultra-wide 10mm F4 pancake lens that is not only compact and light, but is designed to virtually eliminate the distortion that comes with compact lenses.
Venus refers to the 10mm F/4 as the Cookie lens, and it has an optical lens array that consists of 12 elements in 8 groups with 2 aspherical and 4 extra-low dispersion elements. That’s a lot of glass for a lens that is only 25mm deep.
Image Credit – Venus Optics
The lens also has a five-bladed aperture iris which emits a 10-point star for a dramatic look at night with direct light streaming into the lens. The lens has a field of view of 109.3°, making it one of the widest lenses in this category.
The lens also has an extremely close-up focus range of 10cm (4 inches) and the company claims nice separation between the subject and a bokeh-driven background. Its aperture range is f/4-f/22.
Other features include a weight of just 130 grams and a filter size of 37mm. The design makes the 10mm “cookie” ideal for shooting architecture, landscapes, and macros where details are critical without any distortion that draws the eye away from the subject.
Here are a few samples from Venus Optics that indicates just how straight the image is captured, compared to other compact pancake lenses:
Image Credit – Venus Optics
Image Credit – Venus Optics
Image Credit – Venus Optics
Small and compact, the Laowa 10mm F4 Pancake Lens for APS-C mirrorless cameras can fit in a pocket or purse, and won’t weigh down the photographer on a long location shoot.
With this lens attached, it’s easy to see how keeping a higher-end camera in your pocket for those candid photographs could be worth it over simply carrying around a smartphone.
Image Credit – Venus Optics
The retail price is $299 and it comes in either silver or black with mounts for Canon RF, Nikon Z, Sony E, Leica L, and Fujifilm X APS-C mirrorless cameras. Available directly at Venuslens.net.
[source: Venus Optics]
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