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Autofocus

The autofocus of the tested Viltrox is completely noiseless but also a tad sluggish. After pressing the shutter-release you can even start to wonder whether you are not accidentally in the MF mode. At the beginning it seems there is simply no reaction whatsoever. The mechanism eventually moves forward, but slowly. As a result, running through the whole distance and confirming the focus takes even 0.8-0.9 of a second. It's hardly impressive.

In the AF-C mode, the lag is a bit shorter and the autofocus moves a tad faster, so the focusing time is shortened to near 0.6 of a second. It's a bit better but still far from perfect.

The accuracy of the autofocus didn't provide you any reasons to complain, but we have to admit in this category the Viltrox fared weaker than its rivals.

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When it comes to front or back focus tendency, the lens didn't cause us any problems no matter to what testing camera it was attached to.

A7R IIIa, f/1.8

A7R V, f/1.8

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 this video, comparing freeze-frames before and after oversharpening, you can estimate that focus breathing of the tested lens amounts to about 14% in the frame centre and 16% on the edge. The difference stems from distortion that changes along with the shift of the focus point. In total we still oscillate around the borderline of high and very high level of this aberration. Unfortunately in this category the constructors of the Viltrox cannot be praised.