The Viltrox 13mm f1.4 is a wide-angle, autofocus, prime lens that’s capable of making some outstanding images. If you want to know the latest wide-angle lens from Viltrox, please check Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 Full Frame Lens Review
It’s made for APS-C cameras and is available in Fujifilm, Canon, Sony, Nikon and other mounts. I shot it on one of my favourite cameras, the Fujifilm X-T3.
This is a very wide lens, and it‘s capable of making some great big, wide, panoramic feeling images that feel full of air and light and space. It’s great for general photography too – I carried this lens with me for two weeks and shot a wide range of images with it. It’s an all-rounder and it seems to be able to turn its hand to anything – street photography, general photography, architecture, streetscapes and landscapes, even portraits – this lens seems to be able to do it all. And its wide, f1.4 aperture means that it can make plenty of background blur too!
It’s a very nicely made lens, with a feeling of very high quality – there’s no doubt that this is a premium product that compares very favourably indeed with lenses from any other manufacturer, and you can feel that as soon as you hold it in your hands. It’s an all-metal lens with no plastic parts on the body (even the hood is metal) and all the markings are very finely engraved. Tolerances are very fine and both the focus ring and the aperture move very smoothly and cleanly. The focus ring, at the front of the lens, is large, with a finely ribbed grip milled into its metal surface so if you’re focussing manually it’s very easy to find with the camera to your eye. The aperture ring is at the back, close to the camera body, and is similarly easy to find. It moves in one-third stops, allowing for fine adjustment.
I do love a wide-angle lens, and this is one of the nicest I’ve used. It has a very full and complete specification – aperture values from f16 to f1.4, a very short minimum focus distance of 22 centimetres for close shots, lightning-fast autofocus and it’s built very nicely too. I must admit that as a photographer, in the past, I’ve tended to use longer lenses rather than wides, 85 and 90mm lenses being particular favourites. Having shot several wide lenses recently though, I’ve woken up to a different aesthetic – I just love the feeling that a wide lens can give, it’s a wide, expansive feel that feels like it’s filled with air and light – just lovely!
I’ve shot many wide lenses in the past but most have been the manual focus – either vintage lenses from the days of film, or modern manual focus lenses. This one, of course, is an autofocus lens, and it’s been a real breath of fresh air. It’s wonderful to have the lens do the work of focusing, no need to use focusing aids like peaking or magnification, just frame the shot and shoot! The autofocus freed me from having to think about focussing and allowed me to focus only on the aesthetic aspects of the shot like line, form, shape, light and colour – as a photographer I found it liberating to let the camera and lens take care of the technical elements, leaving me free to concentrate on the visual components of the shot, and get on with making images!
It’s one of the fastest focusing lenses I’ve used too. A wide-angle lens is at an advantage here because the glass elements within the lens don’t need to be moved too far in order to gain focus; nevertheless, the autofocus at this speed is really quite something. It’s extremely accurate too – I made several hundred images with this lens, but the number that failed due to not acquiring correct focus can be counted on the fingers of one hand!
This lens is very sharp indeed – even shot wide open at its maximum aperture of f1.4 there’s a huge amount of detail recorded. In fact, unless you look very closely, it’s difficult to tell the difference between images shot wide open, and images shot with the aperture closed down a little – both show loads of crisp, clear detail and subjects are very clearly delineated. Without a doubt, this is one of the sharpest lenses I’ve used.
It’s so sharp in fact that most of the time I shot it wide open at f1.4 – I just didn’t feel the need to do anything else. Even shooting on the street, the lens focussed quickly and easily, enabling me to get the shot. I did stop down to f8 to try a little manual zone focussing, which worked really well, but the autofocus system is quick and accurate, so there’s really no need. Sometimes however there were occasions when I wanted really deep focus with all elements sharply and clearly resolved – certain street situations sometimes demand this – stopping down to f8 or f11 will bring the whole visual field into sharp resolution, for those big, breathtaking, panoramic feeling shots.
I sometimes stopped down when shooting at the minimum focus distance too to get a little more depth of field – the plane of focus is fairly thin at close distances so more depth of field is useful here – but other than that, I kept the aperture wide open.
This lens has very strong contrast, producing deep, velvety blacks and bright, crisp whites and strong shades of grey in between. And that strong contrast is one of the factors in its very nice rendering of colour too – colours from this lens are strong, big and bold, giving strong saturation and loads of pop! Colours are big, vibrant and audacious and just leap out of the image – realistic, but with a touch more saturation, to make images that really stand out! These colours are just how I like them, I love saturation in an image and I like colours to come through full and strong and rich; excellent colour performance of this kind is a testament to the high quality of the optics and coatings of the lens.
This lens responds very well to light sources in the frame and in most situations, the coatings do a very good job of preventing the image from losing contrast and washing out. There are occasions though, albeit rare when contrast does drop; light hitting the lens at certain very specific angles will cause a drop in contrast not across the whole shot, but at specific points in the image. Fortunately, there’s a hood included with the lens – it’s stored on the lens when not in use and can easily be clipped into position, and it does a good job of preventing contrast drop when the light’s in the wrong place.
I do love to explore line and form in a shot, and it’s much easier to do with a wide-angle lens than it is with one with a longer focal length. It’s fascinating to see what kinds of shapes and forms reveal themselves in the ordinary world around us and using this lens, with a little practice, it becomes easy to see them. Forms on the street angles made by buildings, street furniture and shadows, lines previously unnoticed – all reveal themselves under the gaze of this lens! Another useful technique I’ve developed with wide lenses is to find two or more centres of interest in a shot, putting one in a corner and trying to find another element in the visual field to complement it. This technique I’ve found works really well, and the wider the lens, the better it works!
I wouldn’t usually think of a wide-angle lens as a good choice for producing very much, if any, background blur. However, its wide aperture of f1.4 and its very short minimum focus distance of twenty-two centimetres mean that this lens is different. Shot wide open and close up this lens makes loads of blur and that, coupled with its inherent sharpness means that close subjects are strikingly and clearly delineated, with a very clear separation of subject from the background, and lots of 3D pop!
Up close, this lens gives what I consider to be an optimal blur – while there are plenty of blurs available there’s not so much as to wash away all detail and lose any hint of forms in the background, as would happen with a longer focal length lens, a 50mm for example, at the same aperture setting. Blur from this lens preserves some detail and outlines and shapes of forms can still be seen in the background, preserving some structure in the shot. After all, if there’s so much blur that everything is washed away, there’s effectively no blur at all!
The lens will also give some background blur at longer distances – it does drop off quickly in such a wide lens but if you keep the aperture fully open it will make blur at surprisingly long distances. Even shooting people on the street I found some background blur persisted which, although it wasn’t strongly pronounced, was enough to separate the subject from the background very effectively.
Blur from the lens has a very nice character too – it’s soft and lovely, so soft you could fall into it, and it stays smooth throughout the distance range too, despite my best efforts I couldn’t find any point at which the blur becomes harsh or rough. Smoothness is preserved throughout the range of the camera to subject, and subject to background distances.
I’m glad to say that distortion is very well corrected in this lens, and I encountered none of the bendings of straight lines that are sometimes seen in very wide-angle lenses. Any lines in the shot, whether lamp posts, buildings or anything else, all stayed perfectly straight and correct! This is a real strength in a wide-angle lens – it means that whatever you shoot is accurately represented, so architectural photography is yet another area in which this lens excels!
It’s a very nicely made lens, with a feeling of very high quality – there’s no doubt that this is a premium product that compares very favourably indeed with lenses from any other manufacturer, and you can feel that as soon as you hold it in your hands. It’s an all-metal lens with no plastic parts on the body (even the hood is metal) and all the markings are very finely engraved. Tolerances are very fine and both the focus ring and the aperture move very smoothly and cleanly. The focus ring, at the front of the lens, is large, with a finely ribbed grip milled into its metal surface so if you’re focussing manually it’s very easy to find with the camera to your eye. The aperture ring is at the back, close to the camera body, and is similarly easy to find. It moves in one-third stops, allowing for fine adjustment.
Compared to other wide-angle lenses I’ve used this one is physically quite large which surprised me a little, but of course, that’s because this is a very wide lens with a very large aperture. Having said that it’s not huge; it sits on the camera nicely and doesn’t throw it out of balance, either visually or in terms of weight. And despite being fairly large I’m glad too to say it’s not a heavy lens and it proved very easy to carry around all day.
I’ve really enjoyed my time with this lens. After shooting it for a week, and making hundreds of images with it, it’s left me with a really good impression. Sometimes you find a lens that you just get on with, a lens that’s so thoughtfully designed it fits a niche perfectly, a lens that suits you, your personal style and the kind of images you like to make, and I’ve found this lens to be one such. It’s a lens I just can’t help liking – partly because it’s very nicely made and finished, partly because of its optical qualities, which are first class, but mostly because of the fantastic images it can make across a range of situations, and photographic genres!
No lens can do everything of course, but this one’s certainly very flexible! It’s equally happy shooting people on the street, close-ups of flowers, wide landscapes or streetscapes full of air and light, architectural photography and general photography too. It’s a great all-rounder that’s at home in many different photographic situations, and it handles them with confidence and aplomb.
