Laowa 20mm 4 Zero-D Shift Lens Announced for Pentax

Venus Optics announces new full frame shift lens, available in the K mount

By wadge22 in Third-Party Announcements on Mar 29, 2022

Venus Optics, the makers of Laowa camera lenses, have announced a new full-frame ultra-wide shift lens—the Laowa 20mm F4 Zero-D Shift—which will be available in a variety of mounts including the Pentax K mount. This new lens is one of Laowa's Zero-D designated lenses (the third available for Pentax), which create rectilinear images with close to no distortion despite the wide angle. This lens offers a shift function of up to 11mm to allow for correction of straight lines to counteract perspective distortion. These features combined will make it a great choice for interior or exterior architecture photography, as well as for stitching multiple images to get panoramas or other wide shots.

The lens should offer a very high level of optical performance, with 16 elements in 11 groups, including two aspherical and three ED elements. It features a 14 blade aperture designed to create sunstars and smooth, circular bokeh. The minimum focus distance is 25cm, allowing for wide angle macro style shots. It is manual focus, manual aperture only because of the shift mechanism, and has no electrical contacts with the camera. The new lens features a 360 degree rotatable hood, and accepts 82mm screw in filters. There is also, available separately, a specially designed rotatable lens support to help create stitched shots.

This lens joins Venus Laowa's lineup of at least seven other unique lenses available in K mount. It is available immediately directly from Venus for US$1,099.00. The specialized lens support will cost $250.00.