Last year, when the Viltrox 75mm 1.2 was announced, I saw a few people getting early release copies and raving about how great the image quality coming from the lens was, especially at the price point. In short, I ended up preording a copy and fell in love!

I already own the Viltrox 23mm 1.4 and love the focal length so I wasn't sure I'd need the 27mm 1.2. The difference in aperture wasn't massive, and the image quality couldn't be too much different right?

As it's been 6 months since it's been launched there are a tonne of reviews around—most of which state how incredible the lens is. I was still debating on whether I could justify two lenses of such close focal length. Here comes the massive deciding but..

My 23mm is very unreliable at autofocus. I cannot trust it to be in focus, even in single-point autofocus. I imagine I just got a lemon of a lens but my focus hit rate is probably around 1 in 4 or 1 in 5! I'll do some tests on this later. But loving the focal length and wanting to use it all the time, I finally decided to pull the trigger and pick up the 27mm 1.2.

It has the same great build quality as the 75mm 1.2, a similar size (the 27mm 1.2 is small), and a similar weight, but a 67mm filter thread instead of the 77mm thread on the 75mm 1.2.

I used the lens for a whole portrait shoot last week and I was absolutely blown away by the results. The sharpness and image quality are both incredible. And the autofocus didn't miss a beat! I had my Fuji XH2 in continuous mode with tracking and eye detection active. I left my focus point in the middle of the viewfinder and let the tracking find Ell's eye. The only times it lost focus or struggled was in pitch darkness when we shot our long exposure portraits, and when Ell completely covered her face with her hair. I'd say about 90% or higher of the shots I took were in perfect focus!

Editing the files was such a great experience too. Some may say 40MP and a super sharp lens are too much for editing portraits, but I absolutely love having all the skin detail! It may be a little more effort to edit but the results of seeing every bit of skin texture just makes me all warm inside.

Remember, these are just my first impressions. I need to shoot with it more to see if there are any quirks or if my opinion changes. I'll give a full  review soon. But as it stands, this is my favourite lens already!

Here's a studio portrait from the Viltrox 27mm 1.2 Pro on my Fujifilm XH2