Laowa was showing a prototype 14-60mm T3.6 FF Stereo Zoom lens at CP+ 20-26 in Japan.
This is a PL mount lens that can also be adapted to other mirrorless mounts such as Sony E mount, Nikon Z mount, and Leica L mount. This is an interesting lens, and it looks like it was designed for stereoscopic 3D 180° VR imagery when using a single image sensor camera. As it is a zoom, it won’t produce a super wide circular view like some of Canon’s consumer offerings. Instead of producing the circular view, Laowa is utilizing a unique imaging method to form a rectangular image split into left and right halves onto the sensor.
Laowa primarily built this prototype to overcome the traditional constraints of 3D and VR filming. Instead of having to rig two camera bodies together to create an optical axis alignment between the two cameras, the 14-60mm T3.6 FF Stereo Zoom lens integrates everything into a single solution. You could use this lens with high-resolution sensor cameras. If, for instance, you had an 8K camera, you could still achieve 4K resolution for each eye.
It has a minimum focusing distance of 56cm, and it weighs in at 4.1kg. I don’t have any further details about this lens, and Laowa told us that it may or may not go into production.
