Viltrox AF 56mm f/1.7 is now available for Sony cameras

If the best camera is the camera you have with you, the full-frame Viltrox 28mm pancake lens means you can truly take your best camera with you, instead of your phone.

These days, with smartphone cameras at 48 megapixels or higher and computational manipulations turning out shockingly good photos, many owners of “proper” cameras will leave their big equipment home when traveling. The argument is always that, while the Sony A7 series cameras turn out amazing pictures, they’re too big and heavy when combined with most travel lenses.

Viltrox 28mm Pancake Perfectly Sized for Travel.

The Viltrox 28mm pancake lens blows a hole through that theory. At just 15mm thick, this full-frame Viltrox 28mm pancake is only slightly thicker than a lens cap. With its sliding lens cover, it can, in fact, work as a lens cap in a pinch. Suddenly, your “big” A7 camera can fit in the pocket of your cargo shorts.

Ideally, however, the Viltrox 28mm pancake is best suited to one of Sony’s compact bodies, such as the A7C. And, at just 2,600 baht, it’s a fit for any budget.

The Viltrox 28mm pancake is the first pancake lens for the Sony system, although the company is rumored to be working on a first-party option. Until now, the closest thing to the Viltrox 28mm pancake lens was Sony’s 28mm f/2 lens, although it is more than twice as thick and, optically, is arguably not any better.

As noted, both the Viltrox 28mm pancake and the Sony 28mm f/2 are best paired ergonomically with the compact A7C body or any in the A6000-range. Paired that way, the camera can fit in just about any pocket, making it a true quality replacement for your smartphone.

However, mounted on an A6000-series APC-C body, the Viltrox 28mm pancake’s focal length effectively becomes 42mm, making it much less attractive. It seems almost counter-intuitive to make such a small lens that requires a full-frame body to reach its native 28mm focal length.

Solid Autofocus, Sharpness Performance.

At just 2,600 baht, you’re not buying Sony G Master quality with the Viltrox 28mm pancake. But its technical performance is solid and an upgrade to your smartphone.

Autofocus.

Cognizant this budget lens would appeal to casual photographers more than pros, we tested the Viltrox 28mm pancake during a recent weekend trip to Pattaya on both the older, full-frame Sony A7iii and APS-C A6400. While the 6400 was a more pleasant experience to use, due to its smaller size, the photos were more pleasing and useful on the full-frame where the focal length was the native 28mm.

Shooting in broad daylight, autofocus performance – there is no manual-focus option with the f/4.5-fixed Viltrox 28mm pancake – was solid and dependable. That performance decreased noticeably, however, during “golden hour” and dusk as light started to fade. The lens often hunted for focus, but not to the point where you’d want to not use it.

Similarly, indoors in dimmer light, autofocus was a bit sluggish and hunting compared with higher-end (and much more expensive) glass.

Sharpness.

This is not a technical review and we didn’t use any test charts and the like to test sharpness on the Viltrox 28mm pancake, but our shots spread over a couple of days showed good sharpness in the middle of the frame on par with smartphones.

You can judge for yourself with the photos displayed here. All were shot in RAW and processed with only basic adjustments in Lightroom using the Auto settings a “landscape” preset that added only a slight amount of texture and clarity to standard sharpening. Photos were exported with the “screen use” sharpening preset. Files could be pushed more to increase sharpness if desired.

In the far corners, sharpness falls off a cliff, however. The Viltrox 28mm pancake also suffers some severe vignetting, but nearly all of that can be corrected in Lightroom. Still, cropping in from the corners would provide a more even sharpness level.

Chromatic Aberration

The Viltrox 28mm pancake f/4.5 lens did surprise in some technical areas. There is virtually no LoCa (longitudinal chromatic aberration) and horizontal chromatic aberration was only evidence when doing extreme pixel peeping even in high-contrast situations. In the palm tree photo, for example, you don’t see any purple/green fringing where the leaf edges meet the sky.

Bokeh & Close-Focusing

You don’t buy the f/4.5 Viltrox 28mm pancake lens for bokeh, but, of course, we had to test for it. And we were pleased with the results. The specular highlights were surprisingly clean even if some cats-eye effect was apparent. The falloff from in to out-of-focus also wasn’t jarring and the soft blur of backgrounds was good for a lens of this type.

The Viltrox 28mm pancake lens claims to focus as close as 32mm, but our real world experience was that it had problems focusing at that distance with noticeable hunting. You’ll want to take a step back. It’s not a macro lens, anyway, with only 0.11/1 magnification.

Conclusion

Our overall experience using the Viltrox 28mm pancake for a weekend getaway trip was a pleasant one. It’s an amazing thing to have a high-end, full-frame camera right in your pocket and the tiny size of the lens makes that a reality. Match it with the compact Sony A7C or A7C II and you’re going to take some terrific travel photos. The Viltrox 28mm pancake is also available for Fujifilm.