Revewing the Laowa 15mm ZeroD Shift, and Lens Rewiews.

The Laowa 15mm Zero D Shift, perspective control lens had been in my sights for some time. Before plonking down more than a thousand Euros on a lens, I wanted to be sure it was a worthwhile purchase. With native Nikon PC lenses, you have a certain guarantee that they will be up to a good standard, and not a disaster like the cheap Samyang 24PC lens that was both badly constructed, and optically poor, that I unwisely bought second hand once. I had no local camera dealer with this lens in stock. So I bought it online from the Laowa agent in Milan.

So, I hunted around the internet for some reviews. Here I came across the first problem. This is a specialist lens and at least one reviewer failed to understand that shift lenses are rarely used wide open. F8-16 is the usual aperture setting for these lenses when taking pictures. All my shift lenses are poor optically, wide open.
I found the more reviews I read, the more cautious I became, but at least some consensus emerges.

I also looked at some sites, like the Italian Juza and other places for user comments. Watching somebody use this lens in a real situation on a YouTube video, decided me in the end.

The reviews I came across were:

Amateur Photographer. Pretty fair professional review
Camera Labs. All those test charts put me off at first, especially the wide-open tests. The bit about being able to use the Nikon 14-30 to take the same shot corrected in post threw me off the scent too. This turned out to be the worst review in the end.
Phillipreeve, Admiring Light and Dustin Abbott were good fair reviews.

So, what do I think of this lens. Well, the lesson that I learnt, is that all those test charts have relatively little meaning, or value at the end of the day. Every lens seems to look horrible at 200% in the corners. Sharpness is just one aspect of the performance of a lens. There were some contrasting views concerning the image quality of this lens. So who do you believe.

For interior shots on a tripod closed to at least F8, the lens looks fine, even when viewed on a large screen. The images look pretty sharp in general and contrast is good. The optical problem I found was not really covered in the reviews I read. The lens has a protruding round bulbous front element. On an occasion an interior light above the lens caused some serious flare. Sometimes I need to use my hand as a lens shade. A common problem with super wide angles.

On the practical side, composing in camera with the 15mm shift is precise, compared to the hit and miss method of PP correction of a 14mm lens. This is something that can only be understood by using the lens for an actual photography outing. Here the Camera Labs review, was just plain wrong.

One thing to remember on cameras with IBIS, is that the non-CPU lens choice in the menus, needs to be set correctly, as un-sharp pictures can creep in in if hand held, or with my monopod method. I learnt this the hard way, on a trip to Bologna.

Non CPU lenses are slower to use, as the focus magnifier needs to be used to get the picture perfectly in focus. The lens is solidly built like those old Nikon Ai lenses of yesterday. One little fault is that the focus ring is close to the aperture ring. You need to take a lot of care closing down the lens, to avoid nudging the focus ring. Be prepared to work slowly and carefully.

To finish. I find this a pretty amazing lens, For the interiors of Gothic and Baroque architecture, the crazy perspective, communicates the feeling of space and drama that being inside these buildings gives me, far more than the 24mm PC. For exteriors it needs to be used with great care as for old buildings the exaggerated perspective effects can look unreal with older architecture. Here 35mm PC is my first choice if space allows.

If you enjoy photographing architecture, this is a great lens to own, as it opens up a lot of compositional possibilities

Now some concrete reasons why I like this lens.

The Ghiara Reggio Emilia. The perspective effect adds the dama that Baroque Architecture is all about.

The corners in this interior look pretty sharp in the real world.

Gothic space.

In very closed spaces, you get the shot at the cost of a distorted looking building at pinnacle level.

Duomo Fidenza

Duomo Fidenza

That's a good point, really. By being able to frame the way you want in the viewfinder (or LCD), there are no "wasted pixels". So, even if the lens is a bit softer, in the end, you get at least as much resolution, and don't ruin the framing of any of the photos when correcting in PP.

HAND.

You might like to play with a DoF calculator. A 15mm lens closed down to F8 has a pretty deep DoF so any theoretical DoF advantage of a smaller sensor is irrelevant. Here FF and M43 are compared. Note that the circle of confusion needs to be smaller for the smaller sensor, if we are printing to the same size.

Here is a shot that proves without any shadow of doubt that deep DoF is possible with a 135 sensor, contrary to the misinformation I come across on certain photo forums. It was taken with a 24mm PC lens

135 Sensor

M43 sensor

And with equivalent aperture:

HAND.

Just let the pictures do the talking. Is the foreground and background suffisance sharp. In the example I posted, even at high magnification, they are both sufficiently sharp.

HAND.

I have no doubt about that, I just pointed out that great depth of field can be achieved with a 135 sensor too.

This format "war" stuff just pisses me off.

HAND.

I have the latest iPhone. It cannot even come near what I do with my Z7 and the lens reviewed in this thread, even with all the fancy tricks.
The artificial intelligence present in my PP software is not too intelligent much of the time.

The good old ILC camera is still the photography tool.

HAND.

You are ether just trolling me or ..........

HAND.

I'm missing something in this exchange. Let's accept all the facts as posted above. What is the conclusion?

Just an added thought.

Nikon are discontinuing the F mount shift lenses. Maybe Canon will follow suit. Laowa has been pretty smart to see that there is a market for specialist lenses like the one in my OP , that do not seem to interest the big players. Optically it is up there with the Canon 17mm according to a review I read. Not having electrical contacts is worth the €1000 price difference as it works pretty well with my camera's light meter anyway.

Rumour has it that Z mount and R mount shift lenses are planned for release, but it looks like they are pretty low on the release list.

I mostly concur with your thoughts. A couple of things though.

First, I have a Rokinon 24mm T-S lens, and it is definitely good enough (for me) on my D850 at f/11. I often find myself using the tilt feature to bring in foregrounds at the bottom of the frame, and the D850's focus peaking makes doing that a breeze. That said, I'm not surprised that you ended up with a dud (Samyang and Rokinon are the same lens, but sample variation makes no two lenses exactly the "same").

Also, my experience with the Laowa 15mm Zero-D shift lens is that it's good at hyperfocal distances, but rather poor for close-up work (Laowa does make another 15mm lens that works nicely at close distances, but has severe limitations on its shifting capabilities). My copy is a little soft fully shifted on one side, but stays sharp fully shifted on the other side – I need to mark that down on the lens because I was using it to try to do some stuff at Kīlauea and upon reviewing the results saw that I had used the wrong side for the fully shifted framing. Anyway, as it turned out, the shots I ended up liking best that day at Kīlauea were actually taken with my Nikon AF-S Nikkor 28mm f/1.8 (selfies with my girlfriend using a tripod, a flash, and a remote – and just walking around doing a little handheld stuff). I can see where ultra-wide is preferable for architecture stuff, and I was looking forward to a doing a panorama at Kīlauea with my 15mm but I was driven away from the spot I had chosen when an angry swarm of bees stung me three times (on my forehead, one of my ears, and on my stomach).

FWIW, here's a photo I made using the Laowa 15mm handheld last year in Kaanapali:

The EXIF data says 24mm because I forgot to set the correct non-CPU lens data bank my D800. BTW, don't try this at home, I was holding the camera and lens over my head a couple of times to keep it from being submerged (the D800, not surprisingly given how much I abused it) no longer works (stuck aperture lever in the mount).

I found the Samyang sharp enough, but I did not get along with the low contrast. Just a personal thing. The Nikon 24PC which is far more expensive was worth the upgrade for me. I bought both second hand.

The Amateur Photography review talked about sample variation and their copy had one side which was soft. It was the first thing I checked when I got mine. Is it still soft on one side stopped down? I was lucky to get a good copy.

No I will not be risking this lens like you did. The thing that worries me about these Chinese or Korean lenses, is getting them fixed if you have an accident. I dropped my 24PC and Nikon here in Italy rebuilt it, with two new blocks and filter threads. Basically I have a new lens that cost me €500. I do not think that Laowa have a repair or service facility in Europe.

HAND.

The aperture control is nice to have on my F 24PC and 45PC, but lenses without any communications protocols are just as easy to use. The old Ninon 28 and 35PC lenses have a a handy pre-set ring that makes life easier. You focus with the lens wide open, and then close down until the aperture ring hits the stop. The 15mm Laowa is a bit more fiddly as you have to count the clicks when you close down.

Possible perhaps, but not really practical (for me anyway). With a tilted focus plane I don't see a reason to have AF when I have focus peaking and can see if what I want to have in-focus is in-focus or not.

Yes, it's a bit soft fully shifted, even stopped down. That is an extreme shift though, and the solution is to simply rotate the lens 180° so I'm using the same side of the lens for both sides of the frame.

A little tip here for those with non-CPU memory banks. I have two banks dedicated to each lens, one is for f/8 and the other is for f/11 – that way I have the aperture setting recorded (assuming I remember to set it correctly before taking the shot).