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Autofocus

The autofocus of the Viltrox 1.2/35 LAB was tested by us with the help of the Sony A7R IIIa and the Sony A7R V. The mechanism is almost noiseless. This 'almost' concerns the very ending of the focusing range. When the mechanism reaches its proper aim, you can hear a buzzing sound that changes its intensity occasionally but is not especially loud. It seems as if an element, reaching its proper place, oscillated a moment longer, but this fact doesn't change the position of the focus.

The mechanism is not a speed fiend, but also it's not especially slow. Running through the whole distance range and confirming the focus takes about 0.5-0.6 of a second, a value that allows you to work quite comfortably. On the other hand, you would expect something closer to 0.3 of a second or even faster from a lens with journalistic parameters.

When it comes to the accuracy of the autofocus, the Viltrox didn't give us any reasons to complain. The accuracy of the mechanism was good, no matter whether we shot outside or in our studio, with the number of misses never exceeding 2-3%. We also didn't notice any problems with the front or back focus tendencies.

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A7R IIIa, f/1.2

A7R V, f/1.2

Focus breathing

Focus breathing tests show reframing images as you oversharpen them. We conduct the test by manually passing from the minimum focusing distance to infinity with the aperture stopped down; then we check how the field of view of the lens changed as a result.

A frame change ranging from 0 to 5% we consider to be low. Between 5 and 10% you can speak about medium levels. Usually such values also constitute the maximum efficiency level of any breathing compensation algorithms, present in some bodies. Between 10 and 15% focus breathing is high; above 15% its level can be called very high.

Below we present the test video of the Viltrox lens:

Based on the recording above, comparing freeze-frames before and after oversharpening, we can estimate that the breathing of the tested lens amounts to about 20%, and it means a very high level of this aberration. It's apparent the Viltrox lens designers simply have given up on correcting this aberration. For the record, we should add that at the minimum focusing distance, the tested lens's effective parameters amount to 42 mm f/1.44.