VILTROX AF 14mm F4.0 FE/Z Officially Announced

Viltrox announced its autofocus 14mm f/4.0 compact prime for the Sony FE and Nikon Z mounts (sorry, we don't get nice things, it seems).

Viltrox dropped the announcement on its WeChat page, and this news is so relatively fresh that it hasn't even made it to their website yet. The lens features a fluorine coating on the front element to ease cleaning and is expected to be priced at around 999 Yuan, or approximately $199 in U.S. dollars.

Before we get any further, we have to repeat that price – this is a bargain lens that you'd expect to see, like a plastic fantastic 50mm prime level of pricing.

The lens has a metal mount, and what I believe is a polycarbonate body, given its weight, but it's never mentioned anywhere yet on the actual body construction. It has a USB-C plug for firmware updates and also features a manual focus ring.

Other than that, it's a straightforward lens, as it should be for $199.

This is a compact prime, hence the F4.0 maximum aperture rating and its weight of only 170g. It's small enough that you'd take it anywhere as an option with its 65mm diameter and 56mm lens length. It would be the grab-and-go landscape lens that you'd stash in your camera bag, just in case you ever needed it.

That is, of course, if Canon allowed us to have it.

Lens Construction and MTF

The Viltrox AF 14mm has a sophisticated design for such a small and inexpensive prime. It features 4 ED low dispersion elements, and two elements with high refractive glass in its 12 elements in 9 groups element arrangement. It also sports two aspherical elements to aid with aberrations and resolution. That's an impressive optical design for a $200 lens.

If this MTF is to be believed, then the complex design is doing its job. It's impressive with decent contrast and resolution throughout the frame, without a huge dropoff into the corners. While it may not be the pristine sharpness you'd expect from a Canon L grade or similar lens, it's also only around $200. I'd be thrilled to have this lens on either a full-frame or APS-C camera, and could see using it a lot on both.

To give this a relative comparison feel to it, let's look at it compared to the Canon RF 16mm F2.8's MTF. While the scaling is different along the x-axis, it's clear that the falloff of the blue lines (resolution) and black lines (contrast) is far more than that of the Viltrox lens.

It really is no contest; the only benefit is that the 16mm is a faster lens at F2.8 instead of F4.0, but I doubt the 16mm would clean up enough after stopping down one stop. Also, keep in mind that the RF 16mm F2.8 STM is 50% more expensive at $299.

Specifications

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