This first look of the just-announced Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 EVO pancake lens for Nikon Z-mount (now in stock at B&H Photo and Foto Erhardt) is by Scott Tucker (website | Instagram | YouTube):
The quest for a small lens, one that feels like a bespoke match for my Nikon mirrorless cameras and, in particular, the Zf, has seemed never-ending… Most lenses usually end up longer than I want or have materials that feel needlessly cheap and look out of place against the more premium Nikon build.
Today, that search may be over with the release of the $299 USD Viltrox AF 26mm f2.8 EVO pancake for Z.
Viltrox has recently delivered a trio of excellent lenses for Z in their EVO line, offering 35mm, 55mm, and 85mm options with extremely cohesive feature sets. These lenses offer outstanding sharpness, a near lack of chromatic aberration, and a glut of physical controls, including de-clickable aperture rings, custom function buttons, and a unified 58mm filter thread for easy accessory sharing.
I was excited to see what the rumored 26mm EVO would offer as a pancake lens, but also curious as to which physical options would be omitted by virtue of the small amount of lens barrel real estate. I was hoping for a more feature-complete lens than the Viltrox 28 Chip offers, another Viltrox pancake but one without hood or filter support, only supporting a single aperture of f4.5.
What Viltrox wound up delivering lives squarely between the Chip and the previously released EVO trio, with the 26 EVO retaining an aperture ring and manual focus ring, along with a newly designed lens hood that supports 43mm filters as well as a new magnetic lens cap design.
The 26 EVO looks right at home on the Nikon Zf, with a fit and finish that naturally blends into the retro aesthetic. For fun, I also tested it on my Nikon Z9 (more on that in a bit), and it barely protrudes beyond the depth of the grip, feeling as if nothing is mounted at all.
A few notes on the build of the 26 EVO:
- The aperture ring turns in the opposite direction of what you’re likely used to on Nikon Z lens, including the previous EVO trio. This tripped me up constantly, and more often than not, I simply set the lens to f/4 and ignore the aperture ring during shooting.
- The manual focus ring is, by virtue of its small size, quite fiddly to operate when needed.
- Once you mount the hood on, there’s very little reason to remove it, as the magnetic lens cap fits over it.
- The magnet is so strong that you can confidently lift the lens by the cap (not that I’d recommend that).
- Overall fit and finish feels as good as the rest of the EVO line with all of the behind scene features you’d expect like a USB-C port and rubber gasket at the mount
AF-C autofocus performance is what you’d expect from a lens this small with gear-type stepper motors…slow and grindy. I tended to use AF-S mostly, overshooting a bit as I found that sometimes my focus would be slightly off from what was confirmed on the camera. This was more a symptom of shooting in lower light, and in good light I found I had fewer out of focus shots.
Image quality…you know, where the rubber meets the road…that’s where the 26 EVO really steps up and delivers, especially when you consider its size. Sharpness is excellent across the frame even wide open, there is very little CA to find, flaring is much better controlled than the 28 Chip, there is a built-in lens profile so that your straight-out-of-camera jpeg files will have distortion and vignette correction, and bokeh at f2.8 can be very natural and pleasing, thanks to the short minimum focus distance.
Color rendition and contrast are what we’ve come to expect from the EVO line, with the 26 EVO sacrificing very little here by virtue of being a pancake lens.
During testing, I kept coming back to how sharp the center of the lens was, and decided to begin testing the 26 EVO on my Z9 in DX mode, simulating how the near-40mm FOV would look on a DX camera…would it live up to the scrutiny of a 1.5x crop factor?
Not only did the 26 EVO resolve full 45mp FX shots with ease, the 19mp DX files were a revelation – I think that for DX shooters, the 26 EVO is a lens they should take a real look at if they have interest in shooting in the 40mm equivalent range. Thanks to the sharp center in FX mode, DX shooters will enjoy an even better edge to edge sharpness in their crop files.
The following 3 samples are DX shots on the Z9.
Overall, the 26 EVO represents an exciting possibility for anyone with a smaller FX camera who wants a very small wide prime, or even someone with a DX camera, offering a ~40mm DX FOV in a lens that weighs almost nothing and delivers crispy, vibrant, and sharp photos, perfect for walkabouts on the town, trips to the cafe, or just driving around the countryside at sunset. While it doesn’t share the full EVO DNA that we have come to expect, it has it where it counts, and at only 60% the price of the Nikon 26/2.8, is a real value option that optically punches above its weight by a significant margin.
The full article of the 26 EVO lens first look can be found here.
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Additional information on the Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 EVO pancake lens can be found here and here:
Viltrox 26mm f/2.8 EVO pancake lens for Nikon Z-mount officially announced
