A Weird and Wonderful lens.

An email dropped into my inbox today announcing a strange new lens from Laowa.

They have put together the worlds first zoom shift lens. Its a 12-24 for APS ( that's 18-36 in FF land).

I have the 12mm Laowa FF shift lens and it is a very good performer. This new 12-24 seems to be optically quite good, but it is fully manual. Pity it is a APS lens, it would make a pretty cool Architectural travel lens, if I used that format.

From the publicity mail I got.

It has some slight optical downsides according to the linked review, but lens design is moving forward.

It costs €720, which is not expensive in the Shift Lens world.

.

Yes, this lens is really tempting. I hope they upscale to a FF version.

I am at the point were my cameras and lenses do everything an more that I want them to do.

It is only lenses like this that will tempt me to get my credit card out.

I dare not count how many I have, as well as old working cameras to old or battered to sell or trade in.

For a DX user, that lens covers all the useful architectural focal lengths. Sombody starting out in this genre could save thousands with just this lens and an APS body, compared to the huge cost new of my prime shift lenses. ( I bought them all accept the Laowa 12mm SH).

Actually it is just a mod of their FF version. You could just use that one on FF and crop afterwards. Though there might be a slight advantage from higher pixel density in APS-C.
However, the corners already seem mediocre in a 61 MP FF sensor sonyalpha.blog/2022/09/08/laowa-12-24mm-f5-6-ff-rl/

Yes, it seems to be based on a FF zoom, without shift. Optically it seems better than the FF zoom, so maybe some changes were made.