For the longest time I have been complaining about how the newer budget 50mm prime options (from many third-party manufacturers) are made unnecessarily large in size. Kudos to Viltrox for breaking this mold, finally, we have a compact sized, yet highly capable 50mm prime priced in the budget category! Viltrox sent me their latest 50mm F2 Air, and I brought this lens along with my Nikon Z5 on a short holiday to Perth, Western Australia. Based on my experience using this combo for snapshots in this trip, I am sharing my thoughts on why I think this Viltrox 50mm F2 Air is the new best budget 50mm prime for full frame mirrorless cameras. You can check out my mini review in video form here (click).
What I really like about the Viltrox 50mm F2 Air, in bullet points:
- Truly compact in size, and lightweight at 220g only
- Well constructed despite plastic material used
- Minimalist design, in all black, looking sleek
- Good handling with Nikon Z5, well balanced
- Fast and reliable AF with Nikon Z5
- Sharp wide open at F2, with plenty of fine details resolved, and good contrast
- Sharpness is consistent from edge to edge and corner to corner
- Bokeh is beautiful, smooth and non-distracting
- Round shaped bokeh balls, with minimal onion ring effect
- Distortion is well controlled
- Minimal traces of purple fringing/chromatic aberration, thanks to the generous use of 3 ED elements in the lens
- Very pleasing and natural image rendering from the lens
There are of course some flaws, and things I wish to be improved
- Minimum focusing distance is 0.5m, which is a bit too far than I liked. Closer focusing distance can open up more creative opportunities
- Some vignetting shooting wide open
- Flare and ghosting can happen when shooting against strong sources of light
All in all, I was extremely impressed with what the Viltrox 50mm F2 Air can do. Being a budget lens with USD200 price tag, the lens overdelivers. The lens renders really sharp images with beautiful bokeh, and flaws are generally very well managed. Whatever issues I had with the lens, they were non dealbreakers and should not impose much problems in 99% of use case scenarios. I only hope this amazing trend of creating budget-friendly, genuinely compact sized, high optical quality lenses would continue from Viltrox!
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