It even weights more than the fabled Voightlander 25mm Nokton, which comes at around 410g. Curious if the Laowa is optically superior to the Nokton and how they'll do the pricing. The Voigtlander sells for around 900 EUR at the moment.
Amazon US sells MFT version of Mitakon Speedmaster 25mm F/0.95 for $350 and the best price I can get it delivered to EU is around 320€.
Even if Laowa is a new design and somewhat better, it's still a fully manual lens from not-so-highly-reagarded brand and can't sell much above $400€ which would be in line with other Laowa lenses.
A word of warning for anyone who has not tried fast manual lenses before. Even $400-500 is a lot of money to waste if you discover that lens is not suitable for the use you bought it for.
I do like shooting old adapted manual lenses and even though I can't say I master something extreme like shooting sports (tried even sports video under very low light) I can still use them in some non-static situations and I know that manual f/0,95 lens would be all but useless in most cases where native 25mm AF primes are normally used.
My rule of thumb is this: the only reason to buy a "cheap" ($400+ is not cheap in my opinion) manual f/0,95 lens is that you have a specific need for f/0,95 and you are able to shoot in that setup manually.
Don't even imagine being able to shoot anything that is not bolted down and at f/0,95 even MFT DOF becomes so narrow that what you get is best described as "artistic". Regardles of brand, image is not very sharp even at the center so better make sure that the dreamy look is exactly what you were looking for in the first place.
If you need to step down to just f/2, there are plenty of cheaper native lenses which provide superior image quality compared to these chinese ultrafast lenses which have really been optimized to work wide open. Take for example Panny 25mm f/1.7 Asph which is sold around $100€. Step that down to just f/2 and there's absolutely no reason to invest 4-5x more to a chinese manual 25mm if you can only use it at f/2 or higher.
/edit: I just checked that I could get Panasonic Leica DG Summilux 25mm f/1.4 II ASPH delivered to EU for 350€. Unless I absolutely must have that one extra stop at all cost, there is flat zero reason to use the same amount for a no-brand chinese manual 25mm lens which I can use only twice a year.
