Want to lighten your load? The best pancake lenses for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Fujifilm and Micro Four Thirds cameras will do just that. Small, lightweight, and affordable, the lenses get their moniker from their flat, thin profile. They’re designed to protrude as little as possible from the camera body, keeping your setup slim, unobtrusive, and easy to stow away. I've always found that this makes them among the best lenses for street photography, as well as for everyday shooting and travel photography.
Pancake lenses are usually primes but there are also some zooms available, which generally need to be 'telescoped' out before shooting, due to their retractable design. Either way, some compromises are required to shoehorn all the elements that make up a lens into such super-slim optics, and a pancake lens will tend to have a slower maximum aperture than a chunkier equivalent, but that's the price you pay for compactness.
Withall that in mind, here's my choice of the best pancake lenses you can find right now. Just lay off the lemon juice or maple syrup, unless they're weather-sealed…
Matthew Richards is a photographer and journalist who has spent years using and reviewing all manner of photo gear. He is Digital Camera World's principal lens reviewer – and has tested more primes and zooms than most people have had hot dinners! In this guide, he has selected the best-buy pancake lenses for a variety of different camera systems.
Best pancake lenses
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Best Canon pancake lens
This pancake prime is the smallest lens yet for the Canon EOS R mirrorless system. It is compatible with full-frame cameras, but can be equally useful on an RF-S model such as the Canon EOS R100, where it offers an effective focal length of around 45mm, delivering a very natural perspective.
Although it only weighs 120g, this lens doesn't feel cheap or poorly made. On the contrary, it appears to be a well-built optic – but understandably for its price, doesn't have any weather sealing.
A customizable ring at the front of the lens can be adjusted using a small selector switch on the side. This toggles it between being a control ring (for exposure control) and a traditional manual focus ring. However, the ring has a very thin profile, and some may find it difficult to use for manual focus.
See our hands on Canon RF 28mm f/2.8 STM review
Best Nikon pancake lens
The Nikon Z DX 16-50mm f/3.5-6.3 VR is a pancake zoom that perfectly suits the small size of cameras like the Nikon Z50 II. It’s tiny, it’s light, and it’s sure to prove popular with travel and street photographers alike. Its ability to focus down to 0.2m is mighty impressive, though the minimum distance increases with focal length.
Although this lens's plastic build may lack that premium feel, the addition of a silent control ring is a nice mod con – and will be particularly welcomed by video shooters wishing to adjust aperture noiselessly. What the Z DX 16-50mm lacks in speed, it makes up for in price, versatility and convenience. APS-C kit lenses are usually pretty big and clunky, and many camera owners will dream of a compact kit lens like this.
Given that no Nikon Z DX cameras thus far feature IBIS, built-in optical stabilization is a key attraction of the lens. I reckon that Nikon's APS-C format Z system cameras would be much less appealing without this magical little lens on their hit list!
See our full Nikon Z DX 16-50mm f/3.5-6.3 VR review
Best Sony pancake lens
I've been impressed with some of the compact and lightweight 'Air' lenses that Viltrox makes for full-frame and crop-sensor cameras, but this pancake prime is impossibly thin. Even so, it's compatible with full-frame Sony and Nikon mirrorless cameras, as well as being available for Fujifilm X-mount APS-C cameras. Indeed, it works well with APS-C bodies in all three mount options, giving a natural perspective with an 'effective' 42mm focal length.
Despite only being about half an inch thick and only weighing a couple of ounces, it features a stepping motor autofocus system. One thing that's lacking, however, is an aperture diaphragm, so you're limited to shooting at f/4.5. The lens has a simulated 8-sided diaphragm by way of a cutout.
The optical path is based on six optical elements arranged in six groups, featuring two aspherical elements and two ED (Extra-low Dispersion) elements. Image quality and all-around performance are remarkably good for such a tiny lens.
See our full Viltrox AF 28mm f/4.5 FE review
Best MFT pancake lens
One of my favorite pancake zooms is this astonishingly slim yet impressively performing Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 EZ Pancake. Commonly paired with similarly svelte PEN cameras and the Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark IV, it is a liposuctioned version of the larger 14‑42mm f/3.5‑5.6 II R kit lens.
While it's a capable lens, obviously, its standout quality is the optical wizardry of squeezing a 28-84mm equivalent standard zoom (thanks to Micro Four Thirds 2x crop factor) into an optic that's scarcely larger than a tin of Vaseline.
That versatile focal range means you can slap this single lens to the front of your camera and be covered for almost any shooting situation, making it a perfect choice for street shooting, travel photography, or just everyday walkabout use. In fact, it's so slim that you can leave it on your camera in place of a body cap, so that you can always have your camera to hand and ready to shoot without faffing for a lens.
It captures very respectable images, but very much comes into its own as a video lens, as the fully motorized zoom can smoothly and near-silently push in and out of your scene to record more dynamic footage. That electronic zoom also means that you can fully control the focal length from your phone when shooting remotely!
Read our full Olympus M.Zuiko 14-42mm EZ Pancake review
Best Fujifilm pancake lens
Partnered with one of Fujifilm's X-Series range of mirrorless cameras, this neat little pancake lens delivers a 40mm focal length in full-frame terms. This focal length makes it ideal for a range of subjects, from general shooting to street photography.
It's not the fastest prime, with a maximum aperture of f/2.8, and it's certainly not the fastest at autofocusing, either, but both are acceptable compromises for a pancake. Incredibly light at only 84g, it's the very definition of a pancake lens, measuring only 62x23mm. Unlike the original version, this updated model is weather-sealed, if you have a body to complement it.
The diminutive lens is a great match for the likes of the Fujifilm X-S10 or Fujifilm X-T30, and the combination will certainly fit into a large coat pocket when you want to travel light. All-in-all, it's an excellent all-purpose optic!
Read our full Fujifilm XF 27mm f/2.8 R WR review
Best multi-mount pancake lens
If you love the idea of the Fujifilm XF 27mm pancake, but don't love the price, the TTartisan 27mm f/2.8 XF is a brilliant alternative at a fraction of the cost, and in addition to being available for Fujifilm cameras, it also comes in Nikon Z and Sony E mounts.
Performance is broadly on par as well. It has the same aperture range and offers similar levels of sharpness. However, it also suffers from noisy autofocus (although it's not as bad as the Fujifilm lens). It also introduces noticeable vignetting, but nothing that can't be cleaned up with a couple of clicks in post.
The lens lacks weather-seals but since many people use pancakes on non-weather-sealed bodies, this isn't a huge issue. All in all, this is a sharp little lens, weighs and measures next to nothing, and is an absolute bargain – there really is no reason not to add it to your kit bag.
See our full TTartisan 27mm f2.8 review
Best MFT fisheye pancake lens
Pancake primes don't get much smaller than this. The Olympus 9mm f/8 Fisheye Body Cap Lens is one of the most unusual – and most brilliant – lenses I've ever used, and it's an absolutely perfect pancake performer.
On paper, it may seem a Lomography-like toy lens; its elements are constructed of plastic and it only has a single aperture setting (f/8). However, these things are all to its advantage as that makes this optic literally as thin and as light as a pancake! It's an ingenious bit of design, as the lens is only moderately thicker than a body cap lens – so you can leave it on your camera in lieu of a cap, and be ready to shoot at a moment's notice.
Moreover, when affixed to a body like the Olympus PEN E-PL10 you achieve an incredible street photography setup – right down to Weegee's immortal "f/8 and be there" mantra. While on one hand that narrow aperture can seem limiting, on the other it adds to the true charm of this lens, increasing depth of field, making it fantastic for street, travel, and reportage.
Furthermore, it features light fisheye characteristics (with full-frame coverage), meaning that you can experiment with extreme field of view effects without having to shell out for a dedicated fisheye lens. And best of all, it's dirt cheap, retailing for well under 100 bucks/quid in the US and UK, making it essentially a no-risk purchase.
See our full Olympus 9mm f/8 Fisheye Body Cap Lens review
Best Canon DSLR pancake lens
This Canon lens for APS-C format DSLRs has a pancake design that enables a super-slim profile just 23mm deep. It's also a real lightweight at 125g – less than half the weight of Canon’s more conventional EF 24mm lens f/2.8 lens for full-frame DSLRs.
The six-element optical stack includes one aspherical element, Super Spectra coatings, and there's a fairly well-rounded seven-blade diaphragm. Autofocus is courtesy of a quick and quiet stepping motor, with an electronically coupled manual focus ring, though this is rather small and fiddly to use.
This 24mm optic has an ‘effective’ focal length of 38.4mm, which can feel a little narrow for street photography compared to a 35mm focal length. There’s also no image stabilizer, which can be more of a problem given the relatively slow f/2.8 max aperture.
Image quality is impressive with excellent sharpness across the frame and amazingly little color fringing, even without using in-camera corrections.
Read our full Canon EF-S 24mm f/2.8 STM review
Lab data and comparisons
The graph below shows the comparative performance of the lenses in this guide, based on our in-house lab tests. The prime lenses in the group give better results than the zoom lenses for sharpness, although unsurprisingly the Olympus 9mm fisheye lens is an exception. This lens also has by far the worst result for barrel distortion, which again is only to be expected from a ‘fisheye’ lens.
Scores for sharpness and color fringing are averaged from data taken across the entire image frame, from the center to the edges and corners, throughout the aperture range. For zoom lenses, the scores are also averaged from data measured at four different marked focal lengths, from shortest to longest. The same applies to distortion.
Bear in mind that these average values don't fully reflect specific areas of performance. For example, a zoom lens might have noticeable barrel and pincushion distortion at its shortest and longest focal lengths, respectively, which tends to average out when looking at the data overall. For more detailed graphs of each lens's performance, which give the full picture, check out the graphs in our full standalone lens reviews.
How we test
How we test lenses
We test lenses using both real world sample images and lab tests. Our lab tests are carried out scientifically in controlled conditions using the Imatest testing suite, which consists of custom charts and analysis software that measures resolution in line widths/picture height, a measurement widely used in lens and camera testing. We find the combination of lab and real-word testing works best, as each reveals different qualities and characteristics.
