OpticalLimits Reviews the Laowa 100mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift 1x Macro

Laowa is becoming the master of stellar and impressive looking tilt shift lenses with impressive characteristics. The MTF’s from Laowa are usually stunning. I’ve always wanted to see one of their premier tilt-shift lenses go through a serious test, and Optical Limits took out the Laowa 100mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift 1x Macro and ran it through their tests.

What I liked about the review, is that Klaus spent a great deal amount of time going through the mechanics of tilting and shifting and examples of each, it’s a nice beginner tutorial into tilt-shift lenses.

The Laowa 100mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift 1x Macro is a fully manual lens, auto focus and aperture are both manually controlled and there are no electrical interconnects with the camera body, meaning that all settings must be manually entered and for those that are wanting to record or know the aperture of each shot, this means you have to manually record that – somewhere.

Making a tilt-shift lens is no small feat. Not only do you have to have precision mechanical assemblies to control the movements, but the image circle also projected on the sensor must be much larger than your sensor size. The image circle size (and how much you are willing to let image performance suffer) determines the amount you can shift the lens.

So, these lenses are basically large lenses capable of being used on medium format systems. Which is also why Laowa advertises these lenses for the Fujifilm GFX system.

OpticalLimits tests this lens on a Sony full frame camera, which may give different results than a Canon sensor – but this is usually because the imaging pipeline is different than the two systems, and also the microlenses and photodiodes are constructed differently. That all being said, this should give you a good idea on the relative performance – because if it’s good on the Sony A7R series, it’s most likely very good as well on the EOS R5 Mark II and related higher resolution Canon cameras.

OpticalLimits Results

The results of their testing were very positive, with excellent resolution, lack of aberrations and bokeh all being very good.

The optical performance of the Laowa 100mm f/2.8 Tilt-Shift 1x Macro is very decent. In “normal” mode, it is very sharp with minimal CAs. Image distortions are negligible, and the vignetting is low thanks to the large image circle. The bokeh is also smooth. In full tilt mode, the border bokeh deteriorates, but that’s probably to be expected.

As with most tilt shift lenses, the more extreme you shift the more you will lose resolution and increase your aberrations as you get closer to the edge of the massive image circle that these lenses project.

Conclusion

Laowa sells this lens for $1249, which may sound like a lot of money for a fully manual lens, but you really are getting alot of lens for every dollar you spend here.

After a full testing by OpticalLimits, which you can read here, there seems to be little in the way of reasons why you wouldn’t want this lens if you were looking for a tilt shift lens. We do know that Canon will be releasing sooner or later it’s auto focus and auto everything tilt shift lenses which will undoubtably be absolutely amazing, but when you consider that Canon’s own Canon TS-E 90mm f/2.8L Macro Tilt-Shift Lens is over $2200, you can be guaranteed that the price of these new lenses will come with a significant cost.

Don’t forget to check out the entire review by OpticalLimits.