Laowa 10-18mm f/4.5-5.6 Zoom Lens for Sony FE

This lens is currently the widest zoom lens available for Sony E-mount full format cameras. Designed primarily for travel photography. While maintaining brilliant optics, the manufacturer has managed to compress the size of the lens to the smallest in its class, with less than 9.1 cm length and only 496 g clearly outperforming competing lenses. Angles of view from 102 ° (18 mm) to 130 ° (10 mm) give photographers the flexibility to take landscape or architecture shots. The aperture system has been carefully redesigned to produce the best stellar reflection rendering of all the ultra-wide angle lenses available on the market.

Lightweight and compact

Lens designed primarily for travel. The designers managed to compress the size to the smallest and lightest lens of this focus ever. Less than 9.1 cm and only 496 g speaks as a clear answer, the lens is much smaller than other similar lenses on the market, but it is much wider.

10-ray reflections

However, the Laowa 10-18mm has been carefully designed so that the 5 blades of the aperture create a well-defined, sharp and clean 10 beams at the points of light reflection. 

37mm rear filter 

Photographers cannot capture a good photograph of the landscape without applying a filter. Therefore, the lens was designed with this in mind, for the wide-angle focus, the construction of the rear filter with a diameter of 37 mm was chosen.

Square filters 100 mm

Thanks to its extremely compact size, the Laowa 10-18 mm lens can be used with 100 mm wide square filters, unlike the much larger and more expensive 150 mm system that needs to be used with other wide-angle focal lengths. 

The new magnetic holder for the Laowa 100 mm front filter has been developed to use 100 mm wide filters. Unlike the conventional filter holder system with grooves for inserting filters with a diameter of 100 mm, a magnetic holder has been developed, where you can easily place 100 mm filters in a flexible frame on a 100 mm filter holder. This not only eliminates all problems when installing the filter, but also reduces vignetting caused by using multiple filters. The magnetic holder is suitable for two pieces of 100mm wide-angle filters without blocking the light at any angle. 

Introduction of the magnetic square holder of the Laowa 100 mm front filter:

Macro focusing distance

This lens has one of the closest focusing distances among all ultra-wide angle lenses for Sony cameras. It focuses on 15 cm, which offers further use by being able to create mini-macro images. Looking at the other wide-angle lenses with the E-mount, they have the shortest focusing distance of only 28 cm (Sony 12-24, 16-35) and 30 cm for Voigtlander 10, 12 and 15 mm. 

Disabling indexing of aperture positions

On the lens body, the switch can be used to turn off aperture indexing, which is very useful for cameramen.

Lens design

Laowa 10-18mm f / 4.5-5.6 consists of 14 elements in 10 groups with 2 aspherical members one member with extra low dispersion. The patented optical design successfully minimizes distortion and chromatic aberrations to the lowest possible level while providing excellent optical performance from the corners of the image.

Examples of photographs