VILTROX 28mm f4.5 Pancake Lens for Sony E, Auto Focus 28mm f/4.5 FE Chips-Size Ultra-Thin Full Frame Lens for Sony E Mount

This is a fun little lens that makes my A7Cii reasonably pocketable. It is obviously a lens with limited use, given the lack of zoom and the small f stop range. But it does function well as a street photography lens for a full-frame camera (you will want to crop your pictures due to vignetting and lack of zoom. The built-in lens cover switch is a great innovation. The downside is that you can't add any filters because there are no threats.For this price, its a great addition to your camera bag for portability, for street photography, and for an emergency backup lens.

My thoughts on the lens after having tested on an A7III and A7C:Overall image quality is rather good, especially in the middle third of the frame, although it's not terrible at the edges either. It's quite sharp, actually. And chromatic aberration is remarkably well controlled. Flair, however, is moderately atrocious in certain shooting situations. I think a hood would help with this, but there's no direct way to mount a hood. Not having the option to manual focus is also kind of an issue for me, but at the price point I'm willing to overlook this.AF works, but it is rather slow and very antiquated. In AF-S mode, it racks focus all the way to infinity (or back to minimum focus distance) and then tries to find the focal point. It is accurate most of the time (~80%) but does miss here and there. Interestingly, it works far better in my testing in AF-C mode, where it exhibits far less "hunting" and seems to be more responsive and accurate.For $99 it's a total banger. Sure, you can't attach a filter or hood or manually focus, but your get a tiny lens that has AF and surprisingly good sharpness and color rendering. I could totally see this being a good street lens, especially if you post-crop a bit to get a more intimate FOV (although frankly I shoot a lot of street at 28mm).

What this lens lacks in features it makes up for in fun and simplicity. I wish this lens had a lot of things like a variable aperture, manual focus ring, or better close focusing. However, considering it's about the size of a body cap I can't imagine how they would pull any of that off without making it bigger and that would just ruin the experience.What's great:The small size is absolutely amazing. The image quality is great. The autofocus is sufficient, it's no GM but it works well.What could be better:The lens is extremely sensitive to flare and haze, you have to be extremely mindful where your light sources are. The lever to open the lens sticks out a little too much and has gotten snagged when placing in a camera bag and opened the lens.Overall I would highly recommend the Viltrox 28 f4.5, this thing is coming with me everywhere! There is no reason not to have one of these as a fancy body cap with an autofocus skylight!

Pancake size converts A7Cx in a better replacement of FUJI X100VI. FIts nicely in a small sling. The lens is more than adequate, good composition and a bit of post processing and get excellent results. Very difficult to discern with big and expensives lenses on a screen.

This is my second Voltron’s lens. While the concept and idea is to die for, on my Fuji it kept crashing me camera when auto focus was enabled and the same thing happened with my Sony fx3, probably should of returned it but I cold it for 15$ :(

As good as all the reviews. I used this for almost all my street photography for a few days in Paris, and the f/4.5 aperture is just about ideal for most use cases, and the sharpness is shocking for the price, size, and weight. Distortion is simple and easily corrected, and it even handles lights in-frame and has good looking sunbursts. Bokeh is more than acceptable for f/4.5 & 28mm. The built-in cover is frosting on the cake. Just buy it!

Wanted a pancake lens for my ZV-E1, when it works it's great (ok image, very vintage-like). But once in awhile it'll lock up my camera and the only way to reset it is to take out the battery and re-insert.

Lets be honest, It's a gimmick. It works and it is interesting. But for most people if you're going to use this, you might as well use your phone