Ultrawide focal length coverage at 60MP

I'm about to move from shooting with an A7RII+A7II to an A7RV+A7RII, and I have tons of (mostly old manual focus) lenses, but I'm thinking it's time to rethink my travel kit. I'll still also grab some of my old manual primes selected based on the kinds of photos I expect to be making, but the real question is how to cover a big range of focal lengths with sufficient IQ so that the A7RV images will actually look better than the A7RII ones...

Last year, I bought two zooms that I think will still be fine at 60MP:

• Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD Model A057: excellent long zoom lens, including at the long end, just barely small enough to carry when needed

• Tamron 28-200mm f/2.8-5.6 Di III RXD Model A071: slight upgrade from the surprisingly good A-mount Sigma 28-200mm f/3.5-f/5.6 Macro D Aspherical IF that I used on an LA-EA3

The problem is what to do about wider than 28mm. I have an A-mount Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX Aspherical DG that isn't terrible until the extreme corners, but it isn't bitingly sharp anywhere and I don't really see much improvement using it on my A7RII vs. A7II; it's really maxed out around 24MP.

My current solution has been three lenses:

• Minolta MC Fish-Eye Rokkor-X 16mm f/2.8: an old lens, but it's still got game

• Venus Laowa 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 FE Zoom: the widest zoom you can buy, and quite sharp until about 15mm off axis (especially near 10mm), at which point resolution smoothly degrades to the point that the corners are nearly as bad as the old Sigma 12-24mm; it looks crisp on 24MP APS-C, so I think it'll be good on an A7RV's center, but that means the corners will look that much worse...

• Either Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX Aspherical DG or Vivitar (Kiron) 24mm f/2: to fill the gap between the Laowa 10-18mm and Tamron 28-200mm

I think the obvious no-budget-constraints answer would be to replace the 10-18mm and 24mm solutions with:

• Sony FE 12–24 mm F2.8 GM: probably the best ultrawide zoom made... so far... but, expensive, big, and still not awesome in the corners

• Laowa 9mm f/5.6 FF RL: the widest FF ultrawide, which is a little wider and better than the 10-18mm @ 10mm, but honestly not awesomely better, still dropping IQ past 15mm from the center

The 9mm Laowa is cheap and small enough that, well, maybe? However, the Sony 12-24mm f/2.8 is just too big and expensive to still not really eliminate the soft corners problem. The f/4 version of the Sony is cheaper, but honestly is not a big enough improvement over what I have for the cost. I'd even consider the Canon EF 11-24mm f/4L USM on my Metabones adapter, but DxO gave it a rather disappointing 26PMP rating on a 5DS R, which actually sounds disturbingly close to what I can get with my current lenses. The best option might be the new Laowa 12-24mm f/5.6, which actually looks like it might be sharper than the Sony GM at 12mm (certainly not at 24mm), but is it really enough better to be worth the upgrade?

In sum, I think most ultrawide lenses have growing problems past about 15mm off center. I'm starting to suspect this might be a diffraction limit thing, because these lenses all suffer significant vignetting, and that could make the effective aperture size small enough to have resolution diffraction limited. Especially on the Laowa 10-18mm, the corner softness behaves like diffraction rather than field curvature, etc. If that's the case, it might be a really long time before any compact ultrawide zoom does much better than the Laowa 12-24mm past 15mm off center...

So, what do folks here think? For example, would the Laowa 9mm + 12-24mm be a worthwhile upgrade when used on an A7RV? I think IQ would be visibly a little better, but it also would leave an awkward jump between 9mm and 12mm...

In your post it kind of looks that you are writing off the Sony 12-24G pretty easy as an alternative, although it seems from tests that this is a really good lens. I can't compare it to the others you mention, but it is a modern lens that works really well on the Sony. I have used it on the A7Riii en delivers pretty good results, also in the corners. Haven't tried it on the A1 or A7r5 yet.

Finnan, the question I asked stands: is there a worthwhile upgrade for an ultrawide zoom? The Sony 12-24mm f/2.8 is probably the best lens in this class, but doesn't seem as much better as the price and size would suggest, and 12mm is not its best focal length. It is also unclear how much of an upgrade the other options reaching 12mm or lower would be. The Laowa 12-24mm really looks as good as any other option, but is it good enough?

Also, is it really that much better than my Laowa 10-18mm which has the big advantage of hitting 10mm? Here's a shot from my 10-18mm on my A7RII in Paris, raw with minimal correction of CA and vignetting -- JPEG compressed at 50% quality to fit in the 4MB limit, but it didn't inline it, so here's a link: Laowa 10-18mm on A7RII. It is pretty good as I see it... but definitely diffracted in the corners, and it's less good than this around 18mm.

BTW, you should know that I own over 250 lenses (some crappy, some great), and if you think the Tamron 150-500mm is an "average zoom" then you are very much mistaken: there is nothing in its size class that competes, and even the huge Sony 200-600mm isn't as good at the long end. I'd also argue the Tamron 28-200mm is shockingly good for a superzoom; it is better than my Sigma 28-200mm f/3.5-f/5.6 Macro D Aspherical IF, which in turn easily outclasses the other superzooms I've tried. You also seemed to miss my statement that "I'm thinking it's time to rethink my travel kit" -- I travel with 2 bodies and no more than 6-8 lenses, so I want a few lenses that sort-of cover everything in that; the rest are more special-purpose primes.

As for the 60MP camera, the main reason to upgrade is not 60MP, but to get the pivoting rear display with at least 42MP -- especially with ultrawides, it's often critical to be able to focus and compose with the camera in positions my face cannot be in. Plus, I'll get to be in some of my vacation photos. ;-) However, getting an A7RV does mean my A7RII becomes the second body replacing my A7II in that role, so I don't expect I'll be shooting FF 24MP so much from then on. A 24MP sensor gets pretty much everything my Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX Aspherical DG has to offer, and it doesn't focus as close as I'd like, so I'd like to phase it out...

Perhaps I'm underrating the 12-24G? I'm sure it is a very nice lens. The catch is, the reviews I saw all place it squarely behind the GM in IQ and the GM isn't blowing me away -- yet we're still talking about an $1800 lens here. I expect pretty wonderful stuff from lenses in that price range. The most I've paid for a lens so far was $1500 for the Sony 100mm STF, which really is a lens without competition (best apodization, least vignetting, and only autofocus STF).

I'd be surprised if any of the ultrawides produced really stunning sharpness in the corners. Also I see youmention the Laowa 9mm prime but not the Voigtlander 10mm. The latter has some CA toward the edges obviously and significant falloff in the corners. Compared to the Laowa 9mm I would say it's a bit better if you care about strict rectilinearity - if you correct both to be substantially rectilinear,I think the Laowa ends up no longer being wider than the CV 10. The CV 10 may be worth looking at, though, if you actually want anything that wide. It's kind of absurd.

Haha, that's the only lens I bought and still keep from Sony.

Actually bought the A7R2 back when the Voigtländer 10mm f/5.6 became available. Good corner sharpness, if you get a good copy. Though quite some sample variation.

Today I'd go with the Laowa 9mm, but I'm no pixel peeper.
www.lensrentals.com/blog/2017/01/third-party-ultra-wide-lenses-mtf-comparison/
phillipreeve.net/blog/user-guide-ultra-wideangle-lenses-sony-alpha-7-series/

I would review this guide and then hone in on a few to do more investigation on:

phillipreeve.net/blog/user-guide-ultra-wideangle-lenses-sony-alpha-7-series/

Yes, that's a good starting point, but I'm way past that, having gone through lots of reviews, MTF data, etc. I'm now thinking the best would probably be if I had the Laowa 12-24mm + 9mm, but the 10-18mm I have now isn't too far behind that pair, and it's just one lens. I'm pretty much convinced that all three of those Laowas are great lenses limited primarily by diffraction due to a slow f/number made slower by vignetting shrinking the effective off-axis aperture diameter. Critically looking at the 10-18mm images on my A7RII, I'm still a bit disappointed, but it will deliver higher resolution towards the middle on a 60MP FF. In sum, I'm thinking my old Kiron 24mm f/2 and Laowa 10-18mm is good enough for now...

Well, I now have the A7RV and it's really a big step up from the A7RII in a lot of little ways.

• The Laowa 10-18mm looks fine on it, with plenty of crisp detail until you get pretty far out in the frame. Really hard to argue against, because 10mm plus the ability to tweak focal length and the tilt/pivot LCD make very dramatic compositions much easier.

• My old Sigma 12-24mm, well, not so fine. There's only a small central area where it looks close to sharp at the pixel level. Adding insult to injury, it can't AF using my LA-EA4 on the A7RV. I could get an LA-EA5 to fix that problem, but I'm not sure ANY of my A-mount lenses are going to look great at 60MP. Ok, my 500mm AF reflex might, and AF is critical for that, but for travel I'm more likely to bring the Tamron 150-500mm. This might mark the end of me using old A-mount zooms as cheap AF alternatives, and I suspect that means nearly all the cheap AF lenses in SLR mounts are not really competitive in IQ anymore.

• My Kiron 24mm f/2 has glow and low contrast wide open, but actually looks surprisingly pleasant at 60MP and better stopped down. In fact, a bunch of my old manual primes look great on the A7RV. My Minolta 58mm f/1.2 looks absolutely fantastic at f/2 (which is the ideal aperture for its bokeh).

So, I'll probably be going with the 10-18mm and a couple of wide manual primes...

BTW, I tried and don't like the HEIF files. JPEGs look better because the DRO works better on them. In fact, I'm not sure DRO does anything for HEIFs.

Phillip Reeve’s review of the Laowa is not encouraging.

Andrew

You mean the 10-18mm as opposed to the 12-24mm. You're right that it isn't a glowing review, but he also says it's a lens you really want to like, and that's true too. Basically, the corners get smeary. However, that's true of pretty much all ultrawide zooms to some extent, and I could still easily get a 12mm equiv. crop from the 10-18mm @ 10mm on the A7RV with essentially the same resolution as the Laowa 12-24mm @ 12mm on my A7RII. If I didn't already have the 10-18mm, I'd probably get the 12-24mm instead, but given the crop-ably good centers on the A7RV, the 10-18mm really does give more flexibility with comparable final IQ. Of course, you could extend this argument to the 9mm, but then crops would only get you to around 11mm before IQ started to drop, and 11mm is still very wide. The fact is, no zoom lens looks great at 12mm or less...

You don't seem to be worried about geometric distortion. It depends very much on subject matter of course, if geometric distortion is objectionable or not. Personally I'm very picky on it and I always make lens correction profiles for Adobe Lightroom/Camera Raw in case Adobe doesn't provide one.

The Laowa lenses lack communication of their EXIF data which would make corrections extremely tedious for a zoom lens, as mentioned in the reviews on phillipreeve.net. Even for a fixed-focal-length I consider it an annoyance to record EXIF data after shooting in order to have Lightroom automatically apply the appropriate lens profile. This is the main reason why I never considered getting a Laowa lens, even if they offer some nice lenses in terms of optical performance.

You're not wrong. However, it's not like Laowa lenses distort more than competing ultrawides. The Laowa Zero-D lenses have virtually no distortion and as single-focal-length primes don't leave you guessing about what focal length was used. Laowa's other ultrawides tend to have mustache-type distortion but not much of it; it seems many older lenses (even primes) aren't as well corrected, and new lenses are often leaving gobs of distortion as a deliberate trade-off for other benefits (i.e., they distort MUCH more than the Laowa based on the assumption that the camera will automatically correct). I don't find it necessary to correct most of my shots with the Laowa 10-18mm, but I'm probably shooting at between 10-12mm 90% of the time, and a single calibration from Hugin Calibrate Lens can correct that to better than the linearity I see from most automatically-corrected lenses. The only Laowa that bothers me in terms of distortion is the 15mm f/4 Macro, which isn't a Zero-D lens but comes in a +/-6-degree vertical shift mount -- I see little point in a shift lens that needs significant distortion correction in post.

Of course, even if the Laowa lenses had electronic contacts, the Sony bodies wouldn't automatically correct them. This is a plus for the older Sony bodies that can run the lens correction PlayMemories app (e.g., the A7RII), although that app doesn't really handle mustache distortion. It's very annoying that neither the lens correction app nor it's functionality is implemented for newer Sony cameras. In fact, without that app, Sony doesn't even record the manually-set IBIS focal length in the EXIF data, which I think is an inexcusable bit of stupidity.

Same here.

Couldn't agree more, would love to see that fixed for my A7R4 but the likelihood of that is well below 1% IMHO.

[quote="@ProfHankD"]
I'm about to move from shooting with an A7RII+A7II to an A7RV+A7RII, and I have tons of (mostly old manual focus) lenses, but I'm thinking it's time to rethink my travel kit. I'll still also grab some of my old manual primes selected based on the kinds of photos I expect to be making, but the real question is how to cover a big range of focal lengths with sufficient IQ so that the A7RV images will actually look better than the A7RII ones...

Last year, I bought two zooms that I think will still be fine at 60MP:

• Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 Di III VC VXD Model A057: excellent long zoom lens, including at the long end, just barely small enough to carry when needed

• Tamron 28-200mm f/2.8-5.6 Di III RXD Model A071: slight upgrade from the surprisingly good A-mount Sigma 28-200mm f/3.5-f/5.6 Macro D Aspherical IF that I used on an LA-EA3

The problem is what to do about wider than 28mm. I have an A-mount Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX Aspherical DG that isn't terrible until the extreme corners, but it isn't bitingly sharp anywhere and I don't really see much improvement using it on my A7RII vs. A7II; it's really maxed out around 24MP.

My current solution has been three lenses:

• Minolta MC Fish-Eye Rokkor-X 16mm f/2.8: an old lens, but it's still got game

• Venus Laowa 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 FE Zoom: the widest zoom you can buy, and quite sharp until about 15mm off axis (especially near 10mm), at which point resolution smoothly degrades to the point that the corners are nearly as bad as the old Sigma 12-24mm; it looks crisp on 24MP APS-C, so I think it'll be good on an A7RV's center, but that means the corners will look that much worse...

• Either Sigma 12-24mm f/4.5-5.6 EX Aspherical DG or Vivitar (Kiron) 24mm f/2: to fill the gap between the Laowa 10-18mm and Tamron 28-200mm

I think the obvious no-budget-constraints answer would be to replace the 10-18mm and 24mm solutions with:

• Sony FE 12–24 mm F2.8 GM: probably the best ultrawide zoom made... so far... but, expensive, big, and still not awesome in the corners

• Laowa 9mm f/5.6 FF RL: the widest FF ultrawide, which is a little wider and better than the 10-18mm @ 10mm, but honestly not awesomely better, still dropping IQ past 15mm from the center

The 9mm Laowa is cheap and small enough that, well, maybe? However, the Sony 12-24mm f/2.8 is just too big and expensive to still not really eliminate the soft corners problem. The f/4 version of the Sony is cheaper, but honestly is not a big enough improvement over what I have for the cost. I'd even consider the Canon EF 11-24mm f/4L USM on my Metabones adapter, but DxO gave it a rather disappointing 26PMP rating on a 5DS R, which actually sounds disturbingly close to what I can get with my current lenses. The best option might be the new Laowa 12-24mm f/5.6, which actually looks like it might be sharper than the Sony GM at 12mm (certainly not at 24mm), but is it really enough better to be worth the upgrade?

In sum, I think most ultrawide lenses have growing problems past about 15mm off center. I'm starting to suspect this might be a diffraction limit thing, because these lenses all suffer significant vignetting, and that could make the effective aperture size small enough to have resolution diffraction limited. Especially on the Laowa 10-18mm, the corner softness behaves like diffraction rather than field curvature, etc. If that's the case, it might be a really long time before any compact ultrawide zoom does much better than the Laowa 12-24mm past 15mm off center...

So, what do folks here think? For example, would the Laowa 9mm + 12-24mm be a worthwhile upgrade when used on an A7RV? I think IQ would be visibly a little better, but it also would leave an awkward jump between 9mm and 12mm...

Have you tried the new Sony 14mm GM?

Nope, and 14mm really isn't wide enough for me now, although in 2006 it would have felt very ultrawide (that's when I got a 10-20mm APS-C lens for my Sony A100). I'm still quite slow to compose at 10mm, but 12mm feels really comfortable for me now.

I'm in the same boat now, pretty much. Surprisingly, it seems to be hard to pick a good UWA zoom in Sony FE land, even if one only has landscape and architecture subjects as the goal.
The team at PhilipReeve suggested the Sigma 14-24 F/2.8 DG DN as a good option, one that wasn't mentioned above. That, compared with Laowa 9mm or 11mm prime could be the solution, although it's bulky.

Another option that I'm going to research is the 16-35 F/4 PZ. I detest PZ lenses, but I only have experience with the older ones. This new one is said to be somehow different, somehow better. I would be pairing it with a fast UWA prime for astrolandscapes, though.

Finally, there are rumors on Viltrox 16 F/1.8 FE about to be launched. The specs seem to suggest it's intended for astrolandscape stuff, so high quality being the priority. Hopefully we know more/better within the next 2-8 weeks.