The Viltrox 26mm F2.8 Evo is a small lens big on character

This summer, Viltrox released the AF 26mm F2.8 Evo, a pancake-style full-frame lens that aims to be an excellent everyday carry option. I’ve had the chance to spend some time shooting with it in a variety of conditions, and have a surprising number of thoughts on it given how relatively simple it seems.

Optics with character

Despite my concerns about focus, I ended up being pleasantly surprised by how sharp this lens is in the center given the size, weight and price. It won’t win any awards, and you’ll definitely want to stop down for best results (especially at the edges), but again, for what it is I was quite pleased with the results I got. Vignetting is also quite well-controlled, even at F2.8.

The lens shows some longitudinal chromatic aberration in relatively harsh lighting, but again, it’s a pretty decent performance for this category of lens. There’s what I’d call a low-to-medium amount of barrel distortion, too, which Viltrox corrects for with a software profile, but it’s not to the point where we’d say that the software profile is mandatory if you’d rather not, or can’t, use it.

Nikon Z8 | Viltrox AF 26mm F2.8 | F2.8 | 1/30 sec | ISO 64Mitchell Clark

I appreciated the 26mm F2.8’s close-focusing abilities – it’s nice to see that manufacturers are really paying attention to those these days – and I found its bokeh to be inoffensive. It’s not the cleanest ever, but I’m also not typically using a 26mm lens to get the blurriest backgrounds.

This is all relatively standard fare for a prime these days, so what makes me say it has a lot of character? It’s the flare, because wow is there ever a lot of it. If there’s a bright light source just outside of frame, expect the image to look fairly washed-out. The included lens hood (which reduces the lens’s size advantage, though, admittedly, not by much) helps a little, but the effect is still quite strong.

Wow.
Nikon Z8 | Viltrox AF 26mm F2.8 Evo | F2.8 | 1/30 sec | ISO 640

Point light sources in the frame will also produce relatively large streaks of light, in a way that I haven’t seen in a lens for a while, outside of ones explicitly designed to produce that effect. I personally think it’s neat and don’t mind it on a lens that I’d mainly use for fun, but it and the flare are intense enough that I would absolutely think twice before trying to use this lens for a professional shoot, especially if it took place at night. Frankly, I’m a little confused why Viltrox used its “Evo” branding on this lens, as I typically associate it with an impressive level of image quality that this doesn’t quite deliver on.

The shooting experience

While our lens testing standards meant that I exclusively used this lens paired with a relatively hefty Nikon Z8, I still found myself being delighted with this lens’ small size. Paired with a smaller camera, like a Nikon Zf or Z5IIC or a Sony a7C-series, it would make for an impressively small full-frame kit.

Mitchell Clark

Despite its size, the lens has two rings: one for manual focus and a clicked one for aperture. I did, however, find the latter to be a bit touchy, and I ended up with a lot of shots at aperture settings that were 1/3EV off from what I was aiming for. Thankfully, it has an “A” position that hands over control to the camera, which I found useful for times when I was constantly putting it back in a bag.

If you’ve seen our unboxing video for this lens, you’ll know that I was extremely excited upon discovering that it has a magnetic lens cap, which is very easy to remove and, perhaps more importantly, to put back on. After a few months of use, my enthusiasm remains, and it’s something I’d like to see on more lenses. It’s not entirely perfect – I found it was a bit more eager to detach than a traditional pinch design when I was taking my camera out of a bag or putting it back in – but I found myself being much more willing to use it because of the lack of fiddliness in putting it on and taking it off.

The focusing experience with this lens wasn’t my favorite, even compared to other Viltrox lenses I’ve used for Z-mount. It has a unit focus that physically moves in and out as you go from close to infinity, and it’s not particularly quick. While I had a decent hit rate with it, it wasn’t particularly confidence-inspiring in the moment; even a slight move of the autofocus point often led to the lens dramatically changing focus, making the whole scene soft before slowly bringing it back into focus.

This experience isn’t uncommon among pancake lenses, but it’s worth keeping in mind, depending on what you wish to shoot with this lens.

The manual focus experience also isn’t lovely. Given its size, the ring is relatively easy to manipulate, but there was a touch of lag between when I turned it and when the focus actually changed, which led to me frequently overshooting my intended subject. There also isn’t much fine-grained control once you get near infinity, which changes happening in chunks, instead of smoothly.

Summary

I don’t want to come across as being too harsh on this lens. While its $299 price tag may be a bit more than the rock-bottom prices some buyers may be accustomed to from Viltrox, it still seems fair to me given what this lens offers, especially to fans of the 26mm focal length. Pancake lenses often come with sacrifices, and this one is no exception, but the Nikon and Sony lenses it’s competing with cost substantially more… though there are, perhaps, more reasons to choose the own-brand versions over the Viltrox than we’re used to seeing from the brand.

Sample gallery

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Thanks to Nikon for the loan of a Z8 to produce this sample gallery. All images were processed using our standard lens workflow in Capture One, with the manufacturer’s distortion correction applied but no correction of vignetting. The profile corrects a fair amount of barrel distortion, but we don’t consider it an essential part of the lens’s optical design.