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When I checked into my hotel in Osaka for the Lumix Global Summit, it turns out that LAOWA had sent over a nice little surprise, the brand new 10mm full frame f/2.8 Zero-D lens for L-Mount. Check this thing out, it's in a gunmetal blue and it goes real nice with the Lumix S9 in blue.

Now this is a manual focus lens, but it's a very smooth manual focus. And the reason it's manual focus is that Lao is not part of the L-Mount alliance. The Sony and Nikon versions of this lens are autofocus, while the L-Mount and Canon versions of this lens are manual. The manual focus versions however do have an actual aperture ring on the lens, while the autofocus versions do not. Since this lens is all manual, it is also contactless. There's no communication between the lens and the camera. It is a 5 blade aperture, although you can get the lens in a 14 blade aperture, although then it's manual focus no matter the mount.

The lens is made of metal, weighs 420 grams or just under 15 ounces, and it does feel really good in the hand and not too heavy. It has a good solid feel to it. The lens has a built-in lens shade which is removable, and if you want to put a filter on here there is a 77mm thread, so we can put that on.

And keep in mind that any filter you put on here is likely going to vignette a little bit around the corners, given just how wide of a field of view this lens is. The closest focusing distance is an impressive 12cm which is a little bit silly… but kinda cool. Of course the lens doesn't have optical image stabilization, but the Lumix camera does have built in stabilization. You can see I've set it already for this lens, and if we dig into the settings here you'll see that I have basic stabilization already turned on, but I can also turn on E-Stabilization, and if I take that up to high, check out what I can do. I'm walking here, it's almost like a gimbal, that's how good the stabilization is on the S9. When paired with the 10mm, it crops in a little bit, but as you can see, it's still super wide.

This is again a full frame lens, but on Lumix cameras you can also set your video crop to APS-C, so that's about a 1.6x crop, making it a 16mm lens, give or take. Here's some examples. Also, by the way… “Make it Suntory time”.

The widest Lumix prime lens you can buy today is 18mm. This zoom is currently set to about 24… that's 20, and now… this is 10mm. It's a little bit wider! Okay, let's look at some practical examples.

Focus breathing is quite well controlled on this lens. Not that I expect too many people to use it for cinema shots, but it's nice to see that if you focus rack, the edges don't move too… much. Two really important features to me in the camera are the Grid Lines and the Level Gauge. This allows me to know whether my photos are true. If the camera is being held at an angle or perfectly vertical. Let me show you why this matters.

Here's a handful of photos where the camera is not perfectly level versus perfectly level. You can see a dramatic difference. The buildings are falling over; the lines are not true. It looks distorted, but as soon as you get the camera perfectly straight, everything lines up. The shots look so much cleaner, and this super wide lens has absolutely minimal, if any, distortion.

You may have noticed a bunch of us from Osaka posting these cropped photos, especially with this framing here; this super-wide X-Pan look. It just looks so good, especially with the 10mm lens, it really gives you a super wide field of view.

I didn't get to do my wrap up in Osaka, so here we are back in the studio. This lens is wide. Really wide. 10mm is a lot and I've seen it referred to as too wide for real estate photography. I don't know about that. I think that you could probably shoot it with 10mm and crop it when needed. I used to shoot real estate and used a 14mm for the really wide rooms and that was usually enough, but there were times where I wished I had a little bit more. Maybe a 10mm in your pocket would be handy for something like that. Certainly for some real estate and as you saw, even some street photography, it can certainly be fun… but it's not a lens for everybody. At the price of $799 USD, it's not something you're just going to buy on a whim, but if you do have a need for a lens that wide and you know you have a need for a lens that wide, then it's a pretty sweet lens. It is very good quality. It feels great in the hand. It really is a solid build and yeah, I quite like it. If you need it, you know how to get it. Link below.