New Laowa OOOM 25-100 t/2.9 Cine Lightweight Zoom

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Sam Scoggins

Well-known member
"Laowa OOOM 25-100 t/2.9 Cine Lightweight Zoom
Laowa OOOM Cine lightweight zoom is the first professional cinema style zoom lens offered by Venus Optics. The lens features a wide 25-100mm zoom range, making it a one-size-fits- all lens for different types of productions.

Unlike some cine lens in the market which were re-engineered from a photo zoom lens, Laowa OOOM Cine lens is designed for digital cinematography in the first place. It is truly parfocal, meaning the focus will never shift when you zoom in or zoom back out. It is designed to have nearly zero focus breathing throughout the whole zoom range. The aperture remains fixed at t/2.9 at all focal lengths.

It is built with the true cinema level mechanics. It comes with a stepless, t-stop independent aperture ring with an industry standard 0.8 mod /32 pitch gears. The 270° rotation flow provides room or precise focus pulls and the iris is clickless, enabling smooth iris pulls. The lens weighs only 2.16 pounds, which is fairly light for a cinema zoom that holds focus and aperture throughout the focal length range."



Read more: https://fujiaddict.com/2018/09/21/v...laowa-lenses-at-photokina-2018/#ixzz5Rkfq8zWD
 
Are their other lenses any good? I wonder if this is priced below a Fuji zoom price to try and take some market share.
 
Their lenses are good. They aren’t magic, there’s no mojo. They aren’t Leica Zeiss or sigma good. But they are very competitively priced and offer good quality from my experience. A welcome addition to options.
 
For a while their I thought "OOOM" was a typo ! :D
On topic, yeah, their lenses are good, albeit I only have one, and I am happy with it. I own their wide angle 7.5mm F2 and it is sharp e to e and rectilinear with "no visible" CA.
 
filmguy123 said:
Their lenses are good. They aren’t magic, there’s no mojo. They aren’t Leica Zeiss or sigma good. But they are very competitively priced and offer good quality from my experience. A welcome addition to options.
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Shame, I wish they would do something with a character. Seems that they specialize in wide angle lenses, wondering if zoom will have any flaws.

Don't you guys think 25-100 is an odd choice? Why not start with someting like 18-50/55.
 
That is a very convenient range if all is well...most of the time you're wanting more or don't have enough on the wide end (50-135+).

[And Newsshooter thinks it will be below $2,000, which is a crazy good price for a PL lens.]
 
NorBro said:
That is a very convenient range if all is well...most of the time you're wanting more or don't have enough on the wide end (50-135+).

[And Newsshooter thinks it will be below $2,000, which is a crazy good price for a PL lens.]
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I think you read that wrong. That price was in reference to the 12 MM prime also described in the article. No price indication on the zoom.
 
Greg_E said:
I remember a time when Sigma was considered just better than coke bottles.
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filmguy123 said:
Same - crazy how far they've come. Lots of new competition on the market overall, making for some great products and tons of choices.
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But the Coke bottles had a respected name on them.

But yes, it is amazing what we have for gear choices today. 5-10 years ago no one would have thought any of this was possible at the price points and quality we are seeing.
 
It's still very small...only the 1% use PL lenses and they probably are not looking at Venus or Sigma/etc. glass.
 
10 years ago the number of PL mount Super-35 lenses in existence was probably a few thousand. Certainly less than 10,000. That number has expanded exponentially. Still it's a drop in the bucket compared to something like 200,000,000 EF mount lenses.
 
NorBro said:
It's still very small...only the 1% use PL lenses and they probably are not looking at Venus or Sigma/etc. glass.
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Saying "PL Lenses" today is not the same as saying "PL Lenses" 10 years ago. So many lenses are designed with swappable mounts now. My 17-120 is PL. And EF. And(if I just need dumb mount) FZ and F and E and m4/3...

I think Mitch meant that the market for this type of glass is huge now compared to back then, regardless of mount.
 
Saying almost anything in this industry today is not the same as saying it 10 years ago...lots of change everywhere as we know. (I am still not happy about purchasing a LED light for $500 that is now on sale for $49.)

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As far as the mounts, all lenses (if it makes sense to do so) could have always been made to have their mounts swapped (especially by the user), but companies wouldn't offer that if they wanted to make more money. In a perfect world, Canon would have liked to make their cinema lenses only in the EF mount and have only their cinema cameras used, but they saw the writing on the wall with ARRI in charge. It's the same reason why Panasonic sells a camera with an EF mount.

Eventually every market (in this industry) gets saturated as the technology world continues to depreciate, but I can't imagine making PL lenses is too lucrative of a venture these days.
 
NorBro said:
Saying almost anything in this industry today is not the same as saying it 10 years ago...lots of change everywhere as we know. (I am still not happy about purchasing a LED light for $500 that is now on sale for $49.)

---

As far as the mounts, all lenses (if it makes sense to do so) could have always been made to have their mounts swapped (especially by the user), but companies wouldn't offer that if they wanted to make more money. In a perfect world, Canon would have liked to make their cinema lenses only in the EF mount and have only their cinema cameras used, but they saw the writing on the wall with ARRI in charge. It's the same reason why Panasonic sells a camera with an EF mount.

Eventually every market (in this industry) gets saturated as the technology world continues to depreciate, but I can't imagine making PL lenses is too lucrative of a venture these days.
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I don't think it should be looked at as "making PL lenses". Just making lenses. Because so many lenses and cameras can swap mounts today, lenses are a lot more "universal" than they used to be.

The Canon thing frustrates me. You can get all of their Cine Zooms, Compact Cine Zooms and Cine Servo Zooms in EF or PL, but their primes are only EF(I don't really care about the baby cine servo zooms), even though PL versions are possible(Duclos).
 
The Laowa OOOM 25-100mm is selling for $5000 and newsshooter has reviewed it: https://www.newsshooter.com/2020/08/13/laowa-ooom-25-100mm-t2-9-review/

A little soft wide open, a little soft at the long end, some CA wide open, but otherwise good and parfocal and relatively low breathing.

What's really cool is they will also sell a 1.4x full-frame adapter (so it becomes a 35-140mm T4) as well as a 1.3x anamorphic adapter to squeeze 2.35:1 onto 16:9 sensors
 
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