Coming early next year, Voigtlander will be giving some new ultra wide-angle lens options to Sony mirrorless photographers. Today they announced plans to release a 10mm f/5.6, 12mm f/5.6, and a 15mm f/4.5 as native Sony E-mount designs in spring 2016.
With the slower apertures and extremely wide focal lengths, these lenses are surely meant to appease architectural and landscape shooters who desire to pack as much of the environment into one frame as possible. The Voigtlander 12mm f/5.6 and 15mm f/4.5 lenses are already available on the market with a Leica M-mount, and previously an adapter would have been required to get it attached to the Sony lineup of mirrorless cameras. It’s not clear yet whether these new E-mount lenses will be fully redesigned and possibly improved for high-resolution full-frame Sony cameras like the a7R or a7RII, or if it will be simply switching out the mount. However, the Voigtlander 10mm f/5.6 has not been available before and so it is much more probable that this lens could be made from scratch to handle higher-resolutions of the full-frame Sony a7 series.
The new lenses will have electronic connections to properly send lens data such as focal length, aperture, and focal distance to the camera body. As manual focus lenses, this is excellent because it will mean focus assist features of the Sony bodies will be enabled.
A growing trend in lenses being released lately seems to be the option to switch on and off aperture stop clicks, and these Voigtlander lenses will be no exception. The selective aperture control benefits filmmakers by making the aperture transitions during filming much more seamless with no visible stepping and no clicking noise.
All three of these Voigtlander E-mount lenses will be available in spring 2016. There’s no mention of pricing for these yet, but for reference the current Voigtlander 15mm f/4.5 M-mount lens retails for $749 and the 12mm f/5.6 M-mount goes for $699.
[via SonyAlphaRumors and Voigtlander]
This is great news !
Yeah I know I'm going to want to review that 10mm
Would be interesting to see how different it is from the Canon 11-24mm f4 - that 1mm is pretty significant.
I have a Voiglander 35m f/1.2 for my Leica M, While most of their lenses are not on par with Leica Glass, Most of their lenses have character & provide enough detail to be happy with the memory.
For the 10mm, i honestly can't wait till i start seeing some shots by this lens because i think it would add a lot of value to my wedding videos. Also it would be a great landscape solution during travels.
But with 42mp, lets hope these lenses can keep up.