The king is dead, long live the king! After the Voigtlander 10mm 5.6’s field of view has been matched by the Samyang 10mm 3.5 XP and the Laowa 10-18mm 4.5-5.6 it has now been surpassed by this Laowa 9mm 5.6 FF-RL. Can a lens be wider and at the same time better? Let us try to find out!
Lens is being tested on 42mp Sony A7rII and 24mp Leica M10
Last Update: January 2025
An ISO 3200 black and white film is pretty much the fastest film you can get these days. As I like to shoot in dimly lit environments of course I had to give it a try.
Processing and scanning was done at urbanfilmlab in Germany.
Continue reading Analogue Adventures – Part 11: Kodak Tmax 3200
I try to be as objective as possible when reviewing lenses, but I am not always free of preconceptions. When it comes to this Funleader 18mm 8.0 I didn’t really want to review it at first. Funleader sounded more like a name of a company for adult toys to me and with the fixed f/8.0 aperture (and fixed focus) it felt like some Holga/Pinhole lens as well. But the Funleader team did not only keep being persistent in asking me to review their lens, they also improved its design: the lens can now be focused and more importantly the Funleader writing on the casing is much smaller. So this time I had a closer look and found out that it is actually a rather complex design consisting of 6 elements in 5 groups. But is this enough for an 18mm lens? Let’s find out together.
Lens is being tested on 42mp Sony A7rII and 24mp Leica M10
Leica users where the first to discover that their old compact wide angle lenses with the rear element close to the film/sensor plane have some color cast issues on digital cameras. This is an issue that cannot fully be solved by the optical design – at least when following the quest to create compact lenses. But there is something we can do: fix this in post. How to do it? I will show you in this article.
Having reviewed a lot of things this year I thought it might be a good idea to mention this year’s highlights, giving them some well deserved spotlight.
Unfortunately there was also a noticeable amount of junk I reviewed, so this list ended up being a bit short.