Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE lens review

In a world where camera sensors are improving all the time, we need lenses that are capable of resolving vast amounts of detail, and that’s exactly what the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE is capable of. This professional-quality prime lens is perfect for astrophotography and landscape photography, thanks to its ultra wide-angle field of view and fast maximum aperture.

What makes this lens so special, alongside the aforementioned attributes, is the fact that it’s available for a bargain price of just $464 / £533 and produces stunning image quality. Have a look around, and you will struggle to find a similar prime lens at this price. This full-frame lens is available in Nikon Z-Mount and Sony E-mount.

Despite being a full-frame lens, the 16mm f/1.8 can also be used with APS-C cameras to provide an equivalent focal length of 24mm, which is also a useful focal length for both landscapes and astrophotography. The advantage here is that if you currently shoot with an APS-C camera and plan to upgrade to full-frame later, this lens will keep working for you.

For a prime lens, the 16mm does have some interesting and useful features that further increase its attractiveness. Like most primes, it doesn’t feature Image Stabilization, but it does have a manual aperture ring with stepped and stepless control and a couple of programmable Fn buttons alongside its excellent build quality.

Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE: Design

• Compact design
• Weather sealing
• Excellent build quality

Fast ultra wide-angle primes can be quite hefty pieces of glass, but a focal length of 16mm combined with an f/1.8 maximum aperture seems to be something of a sweet spot in terms of size and weight.

The 16mm f/1.8 is a fairly compact and lightweight lens at just 3.35 x 4.06 in / 85.2 x 103 mm with a weight of 19.4 oz / 550 g, so it balances well with full-frame and even APS-C camera bodies.

The lens is made up of 15 elements in 12 groups, including four ED glass and three aspherical lenses. This design aims to deliver sharpness, detail and high contrast while minimizing distortion at wider apertures, and the lens undoubtedly achieves this.

The front element features an HD Nano multilayer coating with a water-resistant and antifouling coating. The front element isn’t bulbous, which is great, and the filter thread size is 77mm, so you don’t have to spend a fortune on circular filters.

One thing we did notice when using 100mm square filters is that the filter holder adaptor ring was difficult to remove from the front of the lens, even when it was 100% screwed on correctly.

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The minimum focusing distance is just 10.6 in / 27 cm, which will be most useful for landscape photographers when focus stacking. This is, of course, of no use for astrophotography.

The aperture is made up of nine blades rather than 11, but this doesn’t produce any problems despite being slightly less circular than 11-blade apertures.

The build quality of the lens is impressive with its all-metal body and weather sealing, giving the 16mm f/1.8 a premium look and feel. The manual focusing ring is wide enough for gloved use.

The lens is designed for both photo and video capture, so the manual aperture ring can be set to stepped and stepless operation via the switch on one side of the lens. Other controls include two customizable Fn buttons and an AF/MF switch.

Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE: Functionality

• Customizable Function buttons
• Digital color screen
• Average AF speeds

As far as prime lenses go, the 16mm f/1.8 alongside Viltrox’s Pro and LAB series lenses is surprisingly feature-packed compared to much of the competition. There’s no optical Image Stabilization; you’ll have to use IBIS if your camera features it, but this lens, which is designed for photo and video capture, has a few tricks up its sleeve that you won’t see available with other lenses.

Since this is a third-party lens, firmware updates can’t be applied in the same way as OEM lenses, but Viltrox has come up with a clever fix for this using a combination of Bluetooth and the Viltrox Lens app.

With the lens unattached from a camera, there’s a USB-C port on the lens mount that’s used to power the lens. Once powered, it can be connected to the Viltrox Lens app, where you can update firmware, customize the Fn buttons and customize the digital screen’s welcome screen.

The color digital screen shows the focus distance and the aperture setting, as well as showing the active Fn control. It’s an interesting feature that’s in essence a digital version of the focusing distance scale window on older DSLR and SLR lenses. It’s most useful when you want to adjust settings quickly without looking at the camera LCD screen or the EVF.

Autofocus is far from the fastest we’ve experienced, and it’s quicker with the aperture wide open at f/1.8 than it is at f/11, for example. It slows as you stop down. With the lens at f/11 or f/16, it takes about half a second to lock onto subjects, while wide open, it’s roughly twice as fast.

Autofocus is driven by an SMT stepping motor, which is claimed to be virtually silent, and this is correct. AF is quiet, but it is audible. Autofocus is absolutely fine for landscape photography, while astrophotographers will exclusively use manual focus, which is comfortable to use.

Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE: Performance

• Fantastic image quality overall
• Excellent sharpness at f/1.8
• Great corner sharpness

There’s no getting around the fact that fast prime lenses are the best option for astrophotography. And while many focal lengths provide ideal fields of view for this type of photography, it’s ultra wide-angle lenses like this that allow you to capture more of the sky and to enjoy greater light-gathering capabilities.

Wide-angle lenses, by their nature, allow more light to reach the sensor. Combined with a fast maximum aperture of f/1.8, you’re onto a winning combination. Of course, image quality is a hugely important factor, and the 16mm f/1.8 is incredibly sharp at f/1.8 and produces excellent corner and edge sharpness to match.

Wide open sees the most vignetting, which is almost gone when you stop down to f/2.8 and completely gone at f/4. There is an Adobe Lightroom Lens Profile available for this lens, which removes the vignette and also the tiny, pretty much unnoticeable amount of barrel distortion that the lens produces.

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Sharpness levels across the frame increase as you stop down to the sweet spot of the lens at f/8, with f/11 still exhibiting high levels of sharpness. The minimum aperture of the lens is f/22, which does unfortunately, exhibit a loss of sharpness due to diffraction alongside f/16. You can, however, achieve great results at f/16 when shooting landscapes, although f/11 will resolve more detail.

The overall image quality is excellent with minimal distortion, barely any at all, and also minimal chromatic aberration. These are both impressive characteristics considering the wide field-of-view of the lens, once again highlighting its suitability for subjects including landscape and astrophotography, where detail is everything.

Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE: Price

The Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE is available for the bargain price of just $464 / £533, which is incredible for a pro-spec prime lens. In the box, you get the lens itself, a lens hood, front and rear lens caps and a soft lens case.

To give the price some perspective, the Sony FE 16mm f/1.8 G costs $848 / £849, which is quite a lot more. It’s a smaller and lighter lens, but the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE itself is still a compact and fairly lightweight lens, given the build quality.

We tested the Sony FE version, but there’s also a Nikon Z-mount version available. There are no other lens mounts available, which is a shame, but perhaps we may see more in the future.

Should you buy the Panasonic Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE?

Whether you shoot with a full-frame Sony camera or even a Sony APS-C camera, this is a lens you really must consider for astrophotography and landscape photography.

The ultra wide-angle focal length, excellent image quality, its robust build and highly affordable price all work in its favor. It’s not as fast as an f/1.4 lens, but this maximum aperture would require the lens to be much larger and heavier.

Plus, despite being a prime lens, the 16mm f/1.8 offers several useful features, including a small digital screen showing useful information, two customizable Fn buttons, a manual aperture ring with stepped or stepless operation and app-based firmware updates.

There’s no built-in Image Stabilization, but its absence helps to keep the size of the lens small, and many cameras offer In-body Image Stabilization anyway, if you need it.

If the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE isn't for you

How we tested the Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE

The Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE was tested over several weeks to capture landscapes lit by a full moon and seascapes around sunset. The lens was attached to a Sony A7R V since the high-resolution sensor is unforgiving and clearly captures the optical flaws of lenses.

The Viltrox AF 16mm f/1.8 FE was used normally in a variety of conditions to test its use in different shooting situations and to assess functionality, including autofocus performance.

Photos were also taken in daylight to check for distortion and aberrations. Sharpness was also checked throughout the aperture range to look at overall sharpness, edge sharpness, corner sharpness and diffraction at a narrower aperture.