Laowa 85mm f/5.6 2x Ultra Macro APO

While full-frame mirrorless cameras have become ever more popular, it’s also now clear that overall, their lenses are no smaller than their SLR counterparts. In part, this is due to simple physics – there’s only so small any given kind of lens can be made – but it also reflects a desire on the part of the camera makers to build optics that meet the demands of high-resolution sensors. If you want a lens to be sharp across the frame at maximum aperture, it’s going to need a lot of optical elements to correct aberrations, which means it’ll be large.

One way around this is to build lenses with smaller maximum apertures. This is what Venus Optics has done with its Laowa 85mm f/5.6 2x Ultra Macro APO. By reducing the