Thypoch is showing off a groundbreaking lens at the NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Show this weekend: the Voyager 24-50mm F2.8, a full-frame autofocus zoom. It’s not just a first for the brand; it’s the first autofocus zoom lens we’ve seen from a Chinese manufacturer.

While this kind of lens has seemed like an inevitability for a while, as we’ve seen increasingly ambitious primes from the likes of Viltrox, Laowa and Sirui, it’s a bit surprising that it’s come from Thypoch. The company is mainly known for manual focus primes, though its sister brand, DZOFilm, does make a range of manual focus zooms focused on cinema users.

The company isn’t releasing full details for the lens yet – though stay tuned – but you can tell just by looking at it that the goal was to make it relatively compact. It’s around the same size as Sony’s 24-50mm F2.8 G lens, though Thypoch’s lens features an internally-zooming design: this is no clone. It also has a clicking aperture ring, a customizable function button and an AF/MF switch.

The Voyager 24-50mm F2.8 is relatively compact for a fast, full-frame zoom.

The brand teased this lens on Instagram a few weeks ago, but its public unveiling is exciting, as it means it’s one step closer to launching. We’ve seen Chinese manufacturers offer very decent budget prime lenses, and even come into their own with more advanced optics, becoming a competitive force driving the traditional players to come up with interesting offerings. If the same happens for zoom lenses, 2025 may not hold the title of the most interesting year for lenses for that much longer.

We’ve been able to spend some time with the lens and get some sample images with it, which you can check out below. We’ll go more in-depth into image quality in a future article. For now, the high-level overview is that we found it to be relatively impressive, though we noticed some softness at the edges (especially when shooting wide open) and a propensity to flare under bright lighting.

We were impressed by its build quality; the aperture ring is satisfying to turn, and the rubber coating on the zoom and focus rings makes it very easy to handle.

Sample Gallery

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Thank you to Sony for the loan of a Sony a7R V to capture this gallery. All images were processed using our standard lens workflow in Capture One, with no vignetting correction applied.

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