If we look at Nikon and Sony's wide-angle prime lens lineups, you'll find some significant gaps. The Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 steps up to fill some of those gaps, and it's a real winner.
Coming to you from Mark Wiemels, this insightful video review explores the new Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 lens. This lens is perfect for travel, allowing you to capture the vastness of landscapes, buildings, or interiors.
Another important aspect discussed is the lens' suitability for vlogging. The Viltrox 16mm f/1.8 allows you to capture both yourself and your surroundings, providing a more engaging experience for your viewers. Its wide field of view means less noticeable hand movement, making your footage more stable. Even with digital image stabilization, which crops the image slightly, the wide angle ensures you still get a good, broad view. This makes it ideal for anyone wanting to enhance their vlogging setup.
The video also highlights the lens' potential for real estate and architecture photography. The ultrawide angle captures the entire room or building, making spaces appear larger and more inviting. This is particularly useful for real estate agents wanting to showcase properties effectively. However, mastering this lens for landscape photography requires a bit of skill. The emphasis on foreground in ultrawide shots means careful composition is needed to balance the elements in your frame.
A key strength of this lens is its performance in low light and its build quality. The 16mm f/1.8 is weather-sealed, has a metal build, and features a USB-C port for firmware updates. It includes two programmable buttons, an aperture ring with a click/de-click option, and an LCD display showing focus distance and aperture, all features that are impressive for a lens at this price point. The video mentions its excellent chromatic aberration control and flare performance, making it reliable in various lighting conditions. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Wiemels.
I kind of like it! You state good for travel But when traveling you want more than one mm size lens. I travel with the Sony FE 12-24mm f/2.8 before that the f/4 plus the FE 24-240mm in aps-c you get 36-360. I started with the 16-35mm f/4. For Astro Milky Way f/4 allows for a 25 to 30 sec capture without elongation or comas with stars and no vignetting in corners. A f/1.8 requires a faster SS for this 8.26s for accurate PhotoPills Spot Stars app default 16.52s but all in all the lens needs to be smaller like the 14, 20 and 24mm because you will want to put on a panorama rig in Portrait view and a heavy lens will be harder to hold in place. The image wanted will be the MW ARCH and staying level is a must doing a 200 degree panorama, just saying! Next for Architecture a 16-35mm is cherished because you will go to many rooms and the need for other mm's. And for travel again more mm's for different places and for landscapes also more mm's due to wider mm's tend to make the horizon further away so a longer mm can bring it closer.
You can make it work like you do for a 50mm just walking it, but travel photographers do not like handcuffs or a lot of lenses in a bag. Todays telephoto lenses are as good as primes anyway. Another lens the 10mm f/2.8 AF lens is suppose to have been made for video also but small also great for astro panoramas.
I think this one is a little late for the game!