Lens-maker Venus Optics has officially announced that it will be releasing a new 12mm f/2.8 full-frame autofocus lens on June 25, 2025. The Laowa 12mm f/2.8 FF II C&D Dreamer will be available in Sony E and Nikon Z mounts with full autofocus, and there will also be Canon RF and L-mount Alliance versions, although these will be manual-focus only.
While Venus Optics has garnered a stellar reputation for producing innovative and often unusual manual focus lenses with remarkably low distortion, this new lens is only the second from the brand to have autofocus, joining the recently released Laowa 10mm f/2.8 FF II C&D Dreamer, which again offers autofocus in its Nikon and Sony versions, with other mounts only having manual focus.
According to Venus Optics, the 'C&D Dreamer' designation in its Laowa lens range is broken down as follows. The 'C' signifies a compact build, the 'D' means minimum distortion, and the 'Dreamer' bit is reserved for lenses that exhibit soft, artistic image rendering.
Indeed, it is compact and light, weighing around 377 grams, depending on the lens mount, and has a reasonably svelte 72mm filter thread. And Venus Optics claims that it produces images with a near-zero distortion. We'll see if our tests bear this out when we get our hands on a review sample.
It's not the first 12mm f/2.8 Laowa lens – that honor goes to the Laowa 12mm f/2.8 Zero-D, which was released back in 2016. But while this 'Zero-D' model signifies a 'close-to-zero distortion' design, it is a significantly heftier lens, weighing in at around 609 grams, and is only available in manual focus, whatever the mount.
While pricing details are expected to be officially released at the time of the announcement on June 25, I expect the lens will be competitively priced. As a rough guide, the autofocus versions of the Laowa 10mm f/2.8 lens cost £799 / £849 / AU$1,449.
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