Review by Klaus Schroiff, published September 2020

Introduction

In a typical Laowa tradition, the build quality is very good indeed. The lens body is made of metal down to the mount and up to the tiny built-in hood. The focus ring is dampened and operates smoothly. The aperture ring offers full stops with clicks only. Weather-sealing has not been implemented. However, it uses an internal focusing mechanism and without any moving outer parts, it's at least reasonably protected. As you can see the lens comes in black but there's also a silver version for Leica M only.

As hinted above, the Laowa 14mm f/4 FF RL Zero-D is an all-manual lens with no electronic coupling (Note: on Leica M cameras you do have rangefinder coupling). While this can be annoying it shouldn't be a showstopper for an ultra-wide lens though. However, even so, this doesn't mean that you shouldn't care about accurate focusing. On our test sample, "infinity" focus had little to do with infinity - the infinity mark was way past it. To some degree, this is Ok in order to compensate for thermal effects but it was "a little over the top" in our case though. However, you can tune the infinity setting by losing the middle screw of the focus tap and moving it to a more accurate position. If you decide to purchase this lens, it's best to check the focus calibration prior to the first photo shooting in order to avoid nasty surprises during image post-processing.