Venus Optics has now officially announced their new Laowa 50mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO lens designed specifically for the Micro Four Thirds system. It’s for use on all of the Panasonic & Olympus cameras as well as more video-oriented systems like the Pocket 4K and various Z-Cam cameras. While this is a manual focus macro lens, it does contain a chip which communicates with your camera. When you spin the focus ring, your camera’s LCD automatically zooms in, you can set your aperture via the camera body instead of a ring on the lens, and it also means the correct details are stored in the EXIF data of your images.
This isn’t the first Laowa macro lens for Micro Four Thirds, having previously released the 65mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO. However, that lens was designed for APS-C, not Micro Four Thirds. This new 50mm f/2.8X Ultra Macro APO is designed specifically for Micro Four Thirds and the chip contained within it should help to overcome some of those annoyances MFT users have faced when attempting to adapt macro lenses from other camera systems. The Laowa 50mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO, as the name suggests, features an apochromatic (that’s what the “APO” means) design to minimise chromatic aberration across the frame. And with short focus distance of 13.5cm and 2x magnification, that’s definitely going to help. The focus range goes all the way to infinity, too, and Laowa says that this can also double up quite nicely as a portrait lens, too.
As it’s a macro lens (and especially a 2x one), naturally there are a lot of bugs in the sample photos for this lens, but that’s not all. Here are some of the sample images shot using the Laowa 50mm f/2.8 2x Ultra Macro APO lens.
The Laowa 50mm f/2.8 2X Ultra Macro APO is available to buy now for $399 from the Venus Optics website. It should come to all the usual places soon. [Lead photo: Richard Wong]
