Adventurer

Hello everyone, I want to report back on the LAOWA 2:1 60mm manual focus and aperture lens for usage on Canon RF bodies. The motivation behind this was the nice flexibility that MacroToWide MWL lenses from Nauticam, Kraken and Weefine offer plus the extreme good performance the original and cheap Canon EF-S 60mm macro showed in the past. So here are the downsides, if you also ponder with that idea: 1st: The Canon EF-S 60mm will instantly switch to 1.6x crop mode once mounted via RF EF Adapter. You cannot switch that of via in-camera settings and I would be very happy if Canon would open this up via a firmware update, but I doubt this will ever happen. The AF with USM Motor is awesome fast and fun to use. However the 1.6x crop will eat up your megapixel resolution, which is not that much of an issue on R5 bodies, but with R6 & R6 Mark II it is an issue. So in conclusion this will still be great for video shooting but you have to decide if approx 15mpx are enough for you in photos on R6mk2 and R6. 2nd: I was willing to go all manual focus and even manual aperture. If you can live with that, the EF-S 60mm will give it to you if falsely injected to bayonet mount and having set your aperture prior upon detachment. Long for a true 60mm and intrigued by the native 2:1 magnification I ordered a LAOWA manual lens. I new that this lens would contract and expand upon focus and is just hiding in a shell aluminum construction for that. So de facto it is not an inner focusing macro lens. Land based testing disqualified this lens. Fully extended it has its maximum magnification and is not at the focus to infinity point nor the hyperfocal distance. It has to contract back almost fully for that leaving you with a vignette for MWL ( macro to wide ) type lenses. So overall the Canon underwater community is needing a true full frame & innerfocussing macro lens for the RF or EF Mount. Let‘s hope they bring something next to their premium RF100mm. The Nikon Community has the wonderful 60mm for which the MWL lens types where originally designed. The Sony shooters can utilize a compact and very fast Canon EF-S 60mm on FF with sigma or metabones adapters. However the AF performance is slower than on any RF EF mount with Canon. If you have news or ideas about a good 60mm FF macro or adaption to RF mount let me know here. thanks

Dear Massimo, I second you on that and must confirm that 95% of the port chart configurations for domes suggested by the manufacturers are wrong and have at least 1-5 mistakes in them. It was always rumored that Nauticam is the only reliable source correctly quoting their radius and specs but now with your post also that icon seems to crumble away. It is no wonder that domes have a bad reputation and allowed the rise and hype of over-heavy and over expensive water contact optics in the past two decades. PS: keep up the good work and publications in your blog. It‘s worthwhile reading and was the source that pointed me to optical bench hub and solved my of my positioning problems. Thank you!

Dear @Phil Rudin thanks for sharing the images. I am exited about this lens and I am pondering with the idea to use it with a Canon R System. Your first pool shots looked very promising but the renderings from the recent North Florida Springs test dive seem to suffer from strong corner stretching making the LAOWA zero D feature somewhat useless. It might be a pure dome positioning and size issue though. To get things right, do you mind to measure/find the entrance pupil (npp) of your LAOWA ? It‘s so new, that there is no data about this lens on optical bench hub yet. So you would serve the community a big deed by topside triangulating it.

Hi Everyone, from Germany! I shoot underwater with Canon DSLM. I have also used mirrorless Sony and MicroFourThirds in the past, as well as various compacts. Looking forward to the vivid information exchange in this board.