Review: Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus – The world’s fastest 28mm lens

In 2022 Laowa released the world’s fastest 28mm lens for fullframe cameras, the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus. If you thought they rested on their laurels you are mistaken: in 2024 they released an even faster lens, this Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus Cine. Usually I don’t review Cine lenses, but how could I possibly pass on the world’s fastest 28mm fullframe lens? Let’s have a closer look!

Sample Images

You can find many of the sample images in full resolution here.

Disclosure

The Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus was kindly provided free of charge by Venus Optics / Laowa for reviewing purpose for a few weeks.

Specifications

The Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus is a Cine lens, therefore instead of f/Stops it has T-Stops engraved. The T-Stop is always lower than the f/Stop and in this case the f/Stop is f/0.95. This lens is not only bigger than the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus because of the Cine housing, but also because it features a completely different optical design. The full specifications are:

• Diameter: 85 mm
• Field of view: 75.2° (diagonally)
• Length: 116 mm
• Weight: 1194g (without caps)
• Filter Diameter: 77 mm
• Number of Aperture Blades: 15 (rounded)
• Elements/Groups: 14/9
• Close Focusing Distance: 0.40 m
• Maximum Magnification: 1:9.2 (measured)
• Mount: Sony E, Nikon Z, Canon RF

buy from manufacturer’s shop | B&H (affiliate links) for $1499

Handling/Build quality

The Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus is an all manual lens without any electronic contacts or communication with your camera. Focus as well as aperture need to be set manually on the lens.

Being a cine lens the focus ring as well as the aperture ring are geared and thanks to the internal focus the rings don’t change their position. Both feature a 0.8 MOD gear standard.

The focus ring has a really nice resistance and turns 211° from the minimum focus distance of 0.40 m to infinity. It has markings in feet on the left side and in meter on the right side.

The aperture ring is located close to the bayonet. It does not feature click stops and the stops are not equidistantly spaced. Therefore they are cramped together in the T5.6 to T16 range. It takes 92° rotation from T1.0 to T16.

If you think of using this cine lens on an A7 series camera, be warned that the ergonomics are not great, as there is only very little space between the grip and the geared aperture ring.

Just like the other Argus lenses also this Laowa 28mm T1.0 features a complicated internal focus design with one fixed and two moving groups that is supposed to ensure good image quality at different distances.
To be able to get the most out of it and to get accurate distance readings the lens ships with shims so that it can be calibrated to your camera.

The outer casing of the lens is made from mainly metal and a few high quality polycarbonate parts, markings are engraved and filled with paint.

The lens does not come with a dedicated hood, but for typical applications probably a matte box will be used anyway.

Cine lenses are often noticeably bigger than still lenses featuring similar (or even the same) focal length and aperture opening. This 28mm T1.0 is Laowa’s biggest Argus lens so far. The 28mm 1.2 is noticeably smaller and less than half the weight. Also the Laowa 35mm 0.95 is noticeably smaller and lighter.

Vignetting

light falloff

T1.0	3.6 EV
T1.2	3.0 EV
T1.4	2.6 EV
T2.0	2.3 EV
T2.8	2.2 EV
T4.0	2.1 EV
T5.6	2.0 EV
T8.0	1.9 EV
T11	1.7 EV

Strong light falloff was expected here considering the specifications. It is even a bit higher than what I have seen from the Laowa 35mm 0.95, but considering this lens is noticeably wider that doesn’t come as much of a surprise.

At shared apertures the values are also very similar to those from the Laowa 28mm 1.2. This faster lens has a tiny advantage in the 1.2 to 1.4 range, but nothing to get excited about.

It is recommended to have a look at this article first to get an idea how this brightness graph works.

optical vignetting

Fast lenses usually show a noticeable amount of optical vignetting. Without going too much into technical details optical vignetting leads to the truncation of light circles towards the borders of the frame.
In the center of the frame almost every lens will render a perfect circle, but only lenses with very low optical vignetting will keep this shape in the corners.
So in the following comparison we move from the center (left) to the extreme corner (right) and see how the shape of the light circle changes.

I shot both lenses at 0.5 m focus distance, but not side by side. If I had done that, the circles of both lenses set to the same aperture value would have the same size in the center.

The Laowa 28mm 1.2 showed surprisingly low optical vignetting, this Laowa 28mm T1.0 does show stronger optical vignetting, also at shared apertures. We also see a bit of a lemon shaped light spill at T1.0, slightly stopped down this is cut off by the diaphragm.

Despite using an aspherical element, onion rings are hardly visible.

Sharpness

MTF-Graphs

According to the MTF-Graphs this 28mm T1.0 is a little less sharp at T1.0 than the Laowa 28mm 1.2 is at f/1.2 – which was to be expected. Both lenses show good performance up to 10 mm away from the center, which inclured the rule of thirds intersections – good news for portraiture. Let’s see how this lens actually performs in the following sections.

Most MTF-Graphs show calculated values that do not take into account manufacturing tolerances and sample variation. Furthermore they are usually calculated for infinity, so in the field and shooting at different distances a noticeable variation may be visible.

Focus Shift

Sony A7rII | Laowa 28mm T1.0 Argus | 33% crops

None of the Laowa Argus lenses I have used showed any signs of focus shift and this is again the case here.

infinity (42mp Sony A7rII)

Being a cine lens I don’t think great infinity sharpness at wider apertures is of high importance. At T1.0 to T1.4 the whole image is a bit softer due to spherical aberration. We also see a midzone dip and a general drop in corner performance, similar to what we saw in the MTF-Graphs. Corners and midframe areas look best at T11.

In this category the Laowa 28mm 1.2 shows a way better performance, offering very good across frame sharpness from f/2.0.

I calibrated the lens using the supplied shims for the infinity mark to match true infinity.

portrait distance (0.9 m, 42mp Sony A7rII)

For portraiture it isn’t so important how flat the field is, it is more interesting to see what the sharpness is like when focused at different parts of the frame to take field curvature out of the equation.

This is what I did here, I refocused for every shot and aperture to get the best possible result at different locations in the frame (center, inner midframe and outer midframe).

Focus distance was roughly 0.9 m and the circle of the dollar bill is more or less the size of a human eye.

T1.0 <————> T1.4

This is a category where I think the performance at wider apertures is very important for a lens like this. Also here the lens is a bit softer at T1.0. Stopping down to T1.4 improves the performance significantly, but the outer midframe still doesn’t look great.

If we compare this 28mm T1.0 to the Laowa 28mm 1.2 and 35mm 0.95, the 28mm 1.2 is the sharpest and looks noticeably better than the other two in the outer midframe. The 35mm 0.95 also shows a slightly better performance at f/0.95 compared to this 28mm at T1.0. This isn’t too surprising, a 28mm T1.0 is even more difficult to design than a 35mm 0.95 or 28mm 1.2.

close (0.40 m, 1:9.2, 42mp Sony A7rII)

The Laowa 28mm 1.2 offered a minimum focus distance of 0.5 m and I was surprised to see an improved 0.4 m from this faster lens. In the T1.0 to T1.4 range it is a bit softer due to spherical aberration, stopping down to T2.0 improves the performance significantly. The Laowa 28mm 1.2 already showed a very good performance at f/1.4, but as said: it also doesn’t focus as close.

Flare resistance

As always evaluating flare is a complex matter since you can get any lens to look bad if you push it hard enough and a slight change of scenario can affect results a lot.

As this is a cine lens it will probably often be used with a matte box which has its own massive hood, which is probably the reason the lens doesn’t ship with a normal hood of its own.

All the pictures you see in this review have been taken without any kind of hood.

At the maximum aperture opening a small ring like artefact can be created when a strong point light source is very close to the center of the frame. Apart from this I didn’t manage to create any unwanted artefacts in these staged scenarios.

Stopped down there are some specific positions that will lead to distinct artefacts: if the sun is in the exact center a complete ring flare can appear. If the sun is in the midframe area a rather big crescent may show up. As is the cast with most lenses, there is a very specific position of a strong point light source in the exact corner, that can lead to a bigger flare.

With a high sun there were still some situations like the one above where this led to significant veiling flare. In many cases this could be mitigated by shading the lens and I think a matte box would serve the same purpose.

I also did some comparisons with the Laowa 28mm 1.2 and interestingly I found this 28mm T1.0 to be more flare resistant. There were some situations where I encountered veiling flare with the f/1.2 lens but not this T1.0 lens. That was a nice and unexpected surprise.

Coma

Correcting coma in fast wide angle lenses is not an easy task, and no one dared to make a 28mm lens as fast as this one before. We saw the corner sharpness isn’t great at wider apertures, and it looks like coma is one of the reasons for that, as there is a notable amount until stopped down to at least T2.8.

Also here the Laowa 28mm 1.2 shows a better performance, showing very little coma from f/2.0 and almost none from f/2.8.

Distortion

The distortion of the Laowa 28mm T1.0 is low, but it is a bit of the wavy type so a correction profile would be needed to fully correct it. The distortion pattern looks very similar to that of the Laowa 28mm 1.2.

Bokeh

A 28mm lens this fast creates a unique look, combining a wide angle view with very shallow depth of field, otherwise only achievable with the help of brenizer/bokehpanoramas and I am sure this is the area many of you are most interested in.

So – as usual – we will have a look how the lens performs at different distances and in different scenarios.

Close distance

I often found the Laowa 28mm 1.2’s minimum focus distance of 0.5 m rather limiting and even though 0.4 m does not sound a lot better, that 10 cm improvement actually makes a big difference in the field.

At these distances those lemon shaped highlights (we already talked about in the optical vignetting section) can be quite obvious when there are point light sources in the background.

Mid distance

Mid distances are where I think this lens works the best, as resolution and contrast seem to be optimized for this. When taking half body portraits the wide angle view in combination with the shallow depth of field also has the potential to really draw you in.

I see this lens being very useful for a host of cine applications here.

Long distance

As is ususally the case things get really interesting at longer focus distances. Here it really comes down to what your backgrounds look like: if they are simple without any structures everything looks great and the big aperture opening creates an unseen look.

As was already the case for the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus and 45mm 0.95 Argus, also here the combination of field curvature and optical vignetting can have a negative impact on the bokeh rendering in the border and corner regions at longer focus distances though. It is easily visible when looking at the roof in first picture on top: in the central part of the frame it is significantly more defocused than in the border regions.

This is not something that will have a negative impact on every picture, but it is a characteristic I am not a particularly big fan of.

I am sure many of you are wondering about the differences compared to the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus, so let’s have a closer look at that.

Compared to: Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus

Scene 1: City Lights 1.5 m

Scene 2: Forest 1.9 m

Scene 3: Fields 2.1 m

Scene 4: City Lights 2.4 m

Scene 5: Forest 2.9 m

Observations

What did we learn here? Generally, the bokeh of both these lenses is very similar.

In the central part of the frame the faster T1.0 [f/0.95] lens unsurprisingly pulls ahead, as it creates even stronger blur. In the border and corner regions that isn’t really the case though: here the lenses look pretty much the same at their maximum aperture opening. This is easily visible in the scenes 2, 3 and 4.

What we also see here from scenes 2 to 5: when the T1.0 lens is stopped down to T1.2 hardly any differences remain. I couldn’t possibly tell them apart.

In many of the scenes I do see the increased central blur of the T1.0 as an advantage, further emphasizing the impression of depth.

Sunstars

Many Laowa Argus lenses feature an aperture diaphragm made of 13 blades, this one even uses 13 rounded aperture blades, therefore you will only rarely encounter sunstars in your pictures. The alignment of the aperture blades is also not perfect on this sample, so the sunstars are usually frayed.
If you want to learn more about this topic have a look at this article.

Chromatic aberration

lateral

Similar to other fast Argus lenses it seems lateral CA were one of the design compromises and are very noticeable towards the corners when not corrected. As you know lateral CA are easily corrected in post though, so this seems like a sensible design choice.

longitudinal

We do see some bokeh fringing in the form of green and magenta outlining, here it isn’t as obvious because spherical aberrations masks it a bit.

The same is true for purple fringing.

The performance here is similar to the Laowa 35mm 0.95, the Laowa 28mm 1.2 corrects this aberration a bit better.

Conclusion

good – unique combination of maximum aperture and focal length – bokeh (mostly) – build quality and handling – comes with shims for calibrating flange focal distance

average -sharpness -CA correction -flare resistance -distortion

not good -high vignetting even stopped down -coma correction -no electronic contacts

Keep in mind this is a review from the point of view of a photographer, not a videographer.

When it comes to super fast (by which I mean faster than f/1.4) wide angle lenses, I really wonder when the first party manufacturers will enter the market.

It wasn’t enough for Laowa to release the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus as the world’s fastest fullframe 28mm lens in 2022, only two years later they released this even faster Laowa 28mm 0.95 [T1.0] Argus. They are really competing with themselves here, which might be the reason they released the f/1.2 as photography lens and this noticeably bulkier f/0.95 [T1.0] as cine lens.

In terms of the look of the final images both these 28mm lenses produce very similar results. The bokeh in the central part of the frame is even more impressive with this faster lens, which in some scenes can really lead to an unseen, unique look.

If you are looking for the sharpest lens, you may not be satisfied by this 28mm T1.0. When it comes to sharpness and coma correction, there are better corrected (slower) 28mm lenses availaibe. Here we should also keep in mind, that for cine applications and aspect ratios which are typical there, the corners of a 3:2 fullframe sensor will be cropped out anyway, so a good coma correction and good corner sharpness are not of utmost importance.

But if creating that cinematic look with a wide angle view and shallow depth of field is what you are after, I think this lens might be for you.

Alternatives

This Sigma 28mm 1.4 Art, the Nikon AF-S 28mm 1.4E, the Nikon AF-D 28mm 1.4 and the Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus are all part of my Fast 28mm Comparison, so best have a look there first. No one else is making a 28mm lens as fast as this, so I will talk about the lenses that come closest.

Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus:
In most of the categories I already compared these lenses directly. The f/1.2 lens is not only significantly smaller, it is also sharper. This T1.0 lens is of course even faster, offers a better minimum focus distance (0.4 instead of 0.5 m) and also more resistant to lens flares. For photography applications, I think the f/1.2 lens is actually the more sensible choice for most.
buy from manufacturer’s shop | B&H | ebay.com | Amazon (affiliate links) for $599

Sigma Art 28mm 1.4:
Despite being more than a stop slower, the Sigma is almost as big and heavy as this cine lens. If you want a 28mm f/1.4 lens with good AF this is currently your only choice for most mirrorless cameras.
buy from Amazon.com | Amazon.de | B&H | ebay.com for $799 (affiliate links)

Laowa 35mm 0.95 Argus:
This is the next widest f/0.95 lens. It offers slightly better sharpness and I also like its bokeh rendering more, but then the difference between 28mm and 35mm is a significant one. Still, the 35mm is my favorite among Laowa’s fullframe Argus lenses.
buy from manufacturer’s homepage | ebay.com | B&H for $649 (affiliate links) also available as cine lens from the manufacturer’s shop | B&H (affiliate links) for $1499

Sample Images

You can find many of the sample images in full resolution here.