New Viltrox 16 f1.8 Need a reality check.

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Captain Spaulding

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Hi Folks. I picked up a copy of the Viltrox 16 f1.8 and at first blush am a little disappointed. My plan is to use it astro and some landscape work. The lens seems soft corner to corner. That said I’m somewhat concerned though about my standards. I took a number of images at a variety of apertures of plants and birds in my garden. My usual standard is, if the image can’t stand up to a 100% crop it’s too soft. With the Viltrox, none of images retain much detail at all cropped 100%

EDIT: It's mounted on Z8.

I have relatively little experience with ultra wide lenses and am not all that confident evaluating them. Am I being too picky?

TIA for any help.
 
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I had this lens briefly over the summer in hope of using it for architecture shots while on vacation. Before my trip I thought the photos I got with it were okay. After many more shots with it during my vacation, I was disappointed. Softness and vignetting were awful. Sold it once I was home from my trip.

I've also used a Viltrox 20mm f/2.8 which I enjoyed very much. The 16mm has reasonably good reviews on YT so perhaps I had a bad copy.
 
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Captain Spaulding said:
Hi Folks. I picked up a copy of the Viltrox 16 f1.8 and at first blush am a little disappointed. My plan is to use it astro and some landscape work. The lens seems soft corner to corner. That said I’m somewhat concerned though about my standards. I took a number of images at a variety of apertures of plants and birds in my garden. My usual standard is, if the image can’t stand up to a 100% crop it’s too soft. With the Viltrox, none of images retain much detail at all cropped 100%

I have relatively little experience with ultra wide lenses and am not all that confident evaluating them. Am I being too picky?

TIA for any help.
Click to expand...
The MTF charts suggests it's very soft.

viltrox_16_1.8_Vig_Graph.png
 
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The MTFs are interesting. Spencer Cox at photography life tested one and concluded it was remarkably sharp. I don’t have access to his graphs right now, but it looked awfully good.

Sample variation?
 
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Here's the photography life test of the lens with some others for comparison. It looks like a very sharp lens which falls off in the corners, but so do the others.

photographylife.com

Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 Review - Page 3 of 6

A hands-on lab review of the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8, a budget ultra-wide lens with surprising performance. See how it measures up.
photographylife.com photographylife.com
 
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Each image focused on the spot in the rock bed note by the arrows. Both are OOC jpgs and have whatever processing the Z8 "standard" picture control applies. My concern is when I crop the image to 100% the rocks, although still identifiable as rocks lose most of their detail.

I guess what I'm not sure about is exactly how much detail I should expect to be able to see?

Z81_0465as.JPG
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Z81_0466s.JPG
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