The NiSi Aureus Prime 18mm T1.4 Full Frame Cinema Lens is a professional-grade ultra-wide lens designed to meet the rigorous demands of modern cinematography. Offering full-frame coverage with a massive 46mm image circle, this lens is built for large-format cinema cameras and delivers impeccable image quality across the entire frame. With its ultra-wide 18mm focal length and fast T1.4 maximum aperture, it excels in both expansive environmental shots and intimate, low-light setups—providing filmmakers with creative flexibility and cinematic depth in any shooting condition.
Whether you’re capturing sweeping landscapes, intricate architectural interiors, or immersive handheld sequences, the 18mm Aureus Prime lens renders each frame with clarity, contrast, and character. The T1.4 aperture delivers extraordinary low-light performance, enabling shallow depth of field and beautiful bokeh even in wide-angle compositions. Combined with the lens’s 11-blade aperture design, this results in smooth, natural out-of-focus highlights and an organic visual aesthetic that enhances every frame.
Cinematic Optical Performance
Engineered with an advanced optical design, the Aureus Prime 18mm lens incorporates ultra-low dispersion elements that significantly reduce chromatic aberration, distortion, and color fringing—delivering lifelike color reproduction and edge-to-edge sharpness. Even at its maximum aperture of T1.4, the lens maintains exceptional resolution and contrast, preserving fine details and maintaining consistent image quality from center to edge.
The lens features NiSi’s proprietary multi-layer coatings that reduce ghosting and flaring while enhancing micro-contrast and maintaining deep, rich blacks. These coatings help ensure superior performance when working in high-contrast or backlit scenarios, making the 18mm lens ideal for a wide range of lighting environments—from golden-hour exteriors to moody interior scenes.
Virtually Zero Focus Breathing
A standout feature of the 18mm Aureus Prime is its near-zero focus breathing—allowing cinematographers to execute smooth focus transitions without altering the frame’s composition. This precise focus behavior is critical for storytelling, especially in dynamic scenes where emotional emphasis is guided through subtle shifts in focus.
With a 300° focus rotation, the lens offers long, smooth focus pulls with finely calibrated resistance, enabling precise manual focus control for complex shots. This makes it ideal for both focus pullers on set and solo shooters demanding accuracy in high-resolution workflows.
Precision-Matched Build for Production Versatility
The 18mm lens shares a uniform mechanical design with the rest of the Aureus Prime series. It features a consistent 90mm front diameter and 86mm filter thread, ensuring compatibility with industry-standard matte boxes, follow focus systems, and screw-on filters. The consistent gear placement across all Aureus Prime lenses simplifies rigging and lens changes, streamlining workflows on set and reducing downtime between setups.
Built with a robust yet lightweight all-metal housing, the lens weighs only 1300g, making it perfectly suited for handheld work, gimbal setups, and drone applications where balance and portability are essential. Despite its ultra-wide focal length, the lens retains compact dimensions without compromising on image quality or mechanical reliability.
Creative Control with Rear Filter Mount and Dual-Scale Markings
The 18mm Aureus Prime includes a built-in rear filter mount, enabling the use of Aureus PL ND Filters, diffusion, or creative filters without adding bulk to the front of the lens. This allows filmmakers to maintain a streamlined and balanced rig while expanding their creative toolkit.
For ease of use in challenging lighting conditions, the lens features glow-in-the-dark markings for focus and aperture rings—allowing quick and accurate adjustments even in dim environments. The dual-scale focus markings are available in both feet and meters, and the user-swappable design lets operators customize the lens based on regional or personal preference.
Perfectly Matched for Full Kit Integration
As part of the Aureus Prime series, the 18mm T1.4 is designed to match seamlessly with its sibling focal lengths (24mm, 35mm, 50mm, and 85mm). All lenses share a consistent optical rendering style, color reproduction, and micro-contrast characteristics, ensuring visual continuity across your entire project. This optical uniformity allows cinematographers to interchange lenses freely without introducing variations in color tone or image character, streamlining the post-production process and maintaining a cohesive visual narrative.
The 18mm lens is compatible with all PL-mount cinema cameras and works flawlessly with PL adapters, including those featuring built-in drop-in filters. Whether shooting on ARRI, RED, Sony VENICE, or Blackmagic URSA systems, the lens integrates effortlessly into any production environment, providing filmmakers with professional-grade flexibility and performance.
Crafted for Cinematic Storytelling
From grand establishing shots to stylized handheld sequences, the NiSi Aureus Prime 18mm T1.4 Full Frame Cinema Lens delivers powerful visual impact with technical precision. It’s a lens built not just for performance, but for storytelling—giving filmmakers the tools they need to craft immersive, expressive, and emotionally resonant imagery.
Whether used as a standalone ultra-wide or as part of the full Aureus Prime kit, the 18mm embodies the core of cinematic artistry: light, clarity, depth, and emotion.