LAOWA 60mm f/2,8 Ultra-Makro 2:1

This is my first macro lens. I bought it on black friday for 400$ and since then I've taken it off my camera only a few times. I can say that it has become my primary lens, but I still prefer to have autofocus sometimes.
It's a great lens for starters in macro world, and with some extension tubes you can get ~3X magnification.
IQ is great for the price, but you can't really compare it with a more expensive lens, it wouldn't be fair.
Paired with a APS-C sensor you get an effective 100mm lens that can do macro and portraits pretty good. Bokeh is also nice and the 2.8 maximum aperture helps to achieve a nice DOF.

I love everything about this lens. For around $400, this lens is an amazing "budget" option for macro. I've had this lens for about a month now and it's met and surpassed my expectations. It's very easy to use and consistently delivers sharp images. The only possible con to this lens, depending on the photographer, would be that it's 100% manual. I personally have no issues with this unless I'm trying to take portrait or landscape photos, in which case I'll generally use a different lens even though this lens can still deliver beautiful non-macro shots. For macro though, I find it easier to just move the camera back and forth to focus, rather waiting a moment for the lens to auto focus. But I understand this may be a drawback depending on you.

This lens was the first lens I bought from VenusOptics and it has changed my life as a photographer.

The 2:1 magnification ratio with such wonderful sharpness makes a big difference to other common macro lenses.

The only problem is that the 60mm unlike the 100mm is completely manual also for the aperture, so at F/11 it's really dark in the viewfinder and you might need some extra lighting to be able to do a right focus on your subject.

That's why I sold mine to buy the 100mm.

I purchased this lens for my Sony a7 as my first dedicated macro lens. Since its purchase, it has become my primary lens for shooting almost everything.

I do not like focus-stacking when I shoot macro. The sweet spot for this lens seems to be around f/8 to f/16. At those apertures, paired with a good flash or bright lighting, you can achieve very high-detail images with a lot of the subject in focus which almost eliminates the need for stacking.

My only complaints, which can be circumvented in technique or in post-processing, are the vignetting introduced at 2:1 as well as chromatic aberration. Other than that, the lens feels really nice and well-built. It is a little heavy, but the weight has never been an issue to me. I would love to see a v2 of this lens with Laowa's apochromatic characteristic, autofocus, and aperture control via camera body.

For its price, this is a very good value for a decent and very capable macro lens at less than half the price of Sony's own 90mm macro and still cheaper than Sony's 50mm macro - both of which shoot up to 1:1.