Back in 2014, I was one of the first reviewers of the Lomography Petzval lenses. They had quirks and charm — as Lomography marketing reps like to say. I, instead, called them annoyances. But at the same time, I couldn’t quiet the whispers coming from my heart. The lens was clad in brass, with smooth-feeling knobs, and gave me image quality that I still admire to this day. Truly, some of my best portraits from 2014 were shot with that lens. Quite literally, I had to stop myself for a little while before continuing to write this paragraph to say out loud, “God, Olivia was so beautiful.” Combined with the output that the lens gave me, I could stare at the image we made together in Brooklyn’s Park Slope for hours. Fast forward to 2025, and the Lomography Joseph Petzval 80.5mm f1.9 is in my office for a loaner period with the 35mm f2 on its way to me after a purchase. Let me tell you something: this is by far, Lomography’s best work yet.

I’m not going to write this article like our typical reviews simply because of the fact that this isn’t a typical lens made by the Japanese, Chinese, or Koreans. It’s a character lens — and granted, I have no idea where this lens is made and manufactured. But the Lomography Joseph Petzval 80.5mm f1.9 gives me pretty much everything I wanted many years ago and even brings some new surprises with it.

You can still control the shape of the bokeh, it still sports the swirly petzval look — but this time it can be controlled, and it’s still manual focus. But this time, it’s very sharp wide open. This time around, Lomography says that the lens is focus-coupled — which in my mind is misleading. To me, that means that it will focus along with the camera’s focusing algorithms in the same way many manual focus Zeiss lenses do. But instead, according to Lomography’s website, it mean, “Focus-coupled technology eliminates focus shifts when adjusting bokeh levels.”

The term that I’m thinking of instead is focus confirmation — that sadly isn’t present in this lens.

It’s also still not weather resistant even though there’s a ton of metal involved with this lens’s design and build. In most cases, it’s an absolute dream to hold, use, and enjoy. And to be honest, I don’t think that I’d ever want to “control” the bokeh. At the #7 setting, you get all the swirly. At the #1 setting, the swirl is subdued but still present. That, when combined with changing the aperture, will affect how the look appears. In my shooting experience, the swirly effect can pretty much disappear at around f4. At f2.8, the lens is sharp enough that you shouldn’t even bother stopping it down if you want to balance the swirl and the sharpness together.

Lomography Joseph Petzval 80.5mm f1.9 product image

The only annoying thing about this lens is the new process of changing the shape of the aperture. You have to go into the back of the lens, unscrew this weird little bit, put the shaper inside, and then screw the bit back in. The problem is that when you put it back together, it’s bound to make the aperture disk spin. More importantly, it’s hard to get the effect of nice heart-shaped bokeh.

Oh, and I wish that Lomography gave us hard stopped apertures instead of de-clicked for video.

And the image quality? Well, in the words of poet Rudy Francisco, “Cupid is irresponsible, and I’m tired of him using me for target practice. If you’re confused by that, then know that I’m in love. genuinely so, even the images where my subject is slightly out of focus look really nice. And I’m not going to lie, getting the focusing perfectly sharp is a challenge in the same way that it was for a lens like the Zeiss Milvux 85mm f1.4 that I used back in 2015. When you get something in focus, you get a feeling of excitement at your accomplishment and at the beauty of the image.

Before I go on, I’ll recap a bit for folks. I’m legally blind — and manual focus is harder for me even when I’m using focus peaking. But even when I was using my contact lenses, which let me see 20/18, I was still having trouble manually focusing this lens and getting my subject perfectly in focus. That’s something that happens with longer, shallower focal lengths that don’t have focus confirmation.

The Canon EOS R that I was testing this lens on had film profiles loaded onto it. Man, I didn’t want to edit most of these photos if I got them the way I wanted to in-camera. This lens is really just that good to the point where it made me feel like there was love surrounding me — something that I don’t typically feel as a journalist when I’m working. And it’s been such a long time since I’ve shot with something like this. I typically only experience this feeling with Leica and early 2010s Zeiss lenses.

Lomography Joseph Petzval 80.5mm f1.9 image sample

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I’m giving the Lomography Joseph Petzval 80.5mm f1.9 lens 4 out of 5 stars. Pretty much the only thing really holding this lens back is weather resistance and making it easier for people with low vision to focus the lens. I’ve always been a very inclusive tester, and those things are insanely important to me. As global warming also becomes more and more a part of our daily lives, weather resistance is crucial.