7artisans 35mm f/1.2 Full Review

This article is from Christopher Frost

Sample photos from 7artisans offical

This is 7artisans 35mm f/1.2, a manual focus lens for many photographer shooters, including canon eos, Sony e-mount, fuji x mount and micro-four third mount. The 35mm f/1.2 manual focus lens gives a lovely standard field of view on an APS-C camera neither wide-angle nor telephoto, so it is a good for casual photography when you pick out your subject. Its extremely wide aperture f1.2 means that you can shoot quite easily indoors and in dark conditions. It can yield some very out-of-focus backgrounds. The experience of using this lens is very much like using 50mm F/1.8 or F/2 lens. on a full frame camera. It is very enjoyable.

 7artisans 35mm f/1.2 Full Review

It is amazingly low for a lens with such a great bright and wide aperture. 7artisans has a nice packaging and this package doesn’t come with a lens hood unfortunately. But the package includes a nice cloth pouch and a thumbrest that you can attach to the focus ring. What really struck me is that the lens is very small and the lens is wide and good aperture. It optical design is very simple and its weights only 175g despite its body being made of metal.

The lens is totally manual focus lens and the manual aperture control needs a little practice at the first. At the rear is the aperture control ring which turns very smoothly without any clicks. It’s quite easy to turn by accident unfortunately because it’s only the back of the lens. It can be a bit fiddly getting the lens on and off your camera but if you want a lens, this small lens must be drawbacks. The focus ring turns very smoothly to about 130 degrees, so that it is just precise enough to successfully focus at f/1.2.

 7artisans 35mm f/1.2 Full Review

it's quite easy to turn by accident unfortunately because it's only the back of the lens it can be a bit fiddly getting the lens on and off your camera but if you want a lens this small there must be drawbacks, too. The focus ring turns very smoothly too. About 130 degrees, so that it is just about precise enough to successfully focus at f1.2. There's also a useful hyper focal scale edged into the lenses body. It comes with a slip-on lens cap which I really like it sticks on satisfyingly and the filter thread is a very small 43 millimeters in diameter.

Overall, I think it looks kind of good on a camera I love this thing's tiny size and workable handling. Image quality. This lens is tiny size and very low price indicating to me a potentially very simple optical formula.

This lens can cope on a modern 24 megapixel aps-c camera my Fuji XT 20. At F 1.2, sharpness is fine in the middle although contrast is low. We also see purple fringing over inner corners image quality immediately crashes and burns shocking. However, if we refocus the lens then we can see a sliver of semi focused image they're surrounded by chromatic aberration. This is clearly one of the worst cases of field curvature in a lens that I've ever seen. Some people claim that field curvature shouldn't be counted as a problem in lens design but it absolutely is it's often a huge pain to work around in your photography if you don't have a flat plane of focus especially if it's this bad.

 7artisans 35mm f/1.2 Full Review

Here's the image quality. At f/2 it's about the same even though we're still focused on the corners so back in the middle. In the middle if that's where you're focused, we see some admittedly very good sharpness at f2. F2.8 is excellent in the middle although sadly that corner softness remains. Some good news they stopped down to f/4 and the lenses reasonably sharp from corner to corner without needing to refocus. It is sharp in the corners and very sharp in the middle. Between the corners and the middle again, we see softness. I knew that drawing a giant Batman symbol in the snow. Would come in useful one day. 

This lens clearly has some complex problems. Let's stop down to f 5.6, that midsection looks about the same now although the corners are sharper than they were f/8 again. We see the same problem and it's only at f 16 that we see even sharpness and even that is somewhat limited now by the effects of diffraction. So, it’s not exactly a glowing report here when it comes to my sharpness test. That's one of the craziest rollercoaster right any lens has taken me on. Softness, color fringing and shocking field curvature are a witch's brew making the lens a terrible perform at any aperture wider than f/4.

Distorting and vignetting. We see some notable barrel distortion here patterned more around the corners of the image. The vignetting is noticeable at half 1.2 but the corners do get lighter at F 2 and F 2.8 even if you stop all the way down to f/8 though you'll continue to see very gentle vignette. Lens can focus as closely as 35 centimeters to your subject pretty good really. At f 1.2 close-up image quality is soft stop down to f/2 for an improvement and at F 2.8. That's as sharp as you’re going to get closer.

 

Bright nights anywhere near the front element of this lens will throw up extreme haziness and wild and colorful flaring patterns which are sure to remind you of that timey dropped acid in a Welsh countryside hippie commune back in the 70s. Finally, bokeh this lens can give you very how to focus backgrounds and so those backgrounds will nearly always look a bit busy really with quite noticeable highlighting at most distances. Its aperture mechanism has 9 blades for smoother baker when the lens is topped down well overall. This lens as tiny size is quite nifty and fun and it is blanked maximum aperture and low price is impressive but the 7artisans 35mm f1.2 stands accused of a string of crimes against image quality. 

 

The verdict being guilty as charged on most counts. I don't want to be too much for snob here the truth is that anyone looking for an inexpensive lens that can get some striking and artistic looking Images will be pleased with it. In a way I did kind of enjoy testing it and using it it's fun but anyone with even a mildest interest in image quality or sharpness should back away slowly.

 

Check the youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGbc25M1KgA&t=138s

 

 

7artisans 35mm F1.2 Mark II for fuji

7artisans 35mm F1.2 Mark II for MFT

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