Here to give you a review today of a very interesting little lens, particularly if you're on a tight budget and are an APS-C mirrorless shooter shooting either a Sony or a Fuji mirrorless body are also if you are a Micro Four Thirds shooter. This lens is the Pergear 25mm F1.8. Now Pergear is a company that I've been familiar with for some time as a distributor of other products and as a retailer but not as a lens manufacturer. This is kind of a new arena for them but what they have created is an incredibly cheap this lens.
If you're on a tight budget and you're looking to experiment with a different focal length maybe to experiment with a manual focus lens. Pergear 25mm F1.8 lens is an intriguing lens on a lot of levels. It's also a pretty fantastic alternative to some vintage lenses. While this kind of focal length is somewhat hard to find in vintage your legacy lenses 25mm, and also I don't find that some of those lenses are as good as what say the standard or short telephoto lenses are.
It's worth a look at. Today we're going to jump in and take a closer look at the build, the optical performance and a consensus give you kind of a verdict on the lens of whether you should consider it. So first, we're going to jump in.
Let's take a closer look at this little tiny optic in terms of its build and its design. Kind of the standout feature that I do want to quickly note while it's facing you here is that it has a nice aperture. Moves incredibly smoothly but it has a high after blade count of 12 blades, which allows it to numb number one, have a surprisingly interesting sunburst effect sun. As you can see here but also of course allows it to retain a circular aperture shape when stopped down which is a useful for bouquet. It would be even more useful if this was also combined with a longer focal length and larger maximum aperture while you might create bouquet with the stop down but you know that's another aside.
You can see upfront; it is a very small forty-three-millimeter front filter thread and you can also see that barrel does extend out a little bit during focusing. You have a kind of unique very small but kind of a knurled focus ring up near the front right at the very front of the lens. You see that they've chosen to go with kind of a bright chrome look. It is going to be a little bit I catching. It's also you know arguably a little bit cheap looking, which is appropriate considering this is a lens that retails for $68.
Truly a tiny little lens it is only 38 millimeters in its overall length, 55 millimeters at its widest and diameter. It is tiny it and weighs in at a hundred and ninety-five grams and that is most due the fact, because this is a surprisingly nice build quality. Everything is all in metal. Metal lens mount- the materials feel nice. You know an interesting combination of cheapness but also a very nice. Build optical formula is incredibly simple this is only five elements in three groups and that's not always a bad thing and your aperture ring here is D clicked and so it moves smoothly and you can rack all the way from F 1.8 through to F 16.
You can see while it is manual everything which means there is no electronics there's no communication to the camera. At the same time, you can still get things like focus peaking and even in body image stabilization if your camera supports it. You will want to manually put in the focal length itself, however, to make sure that the cameras giving you the appropriate amount of stabilization.
But you know, fortunately, it's less of a limiting principle here as it used to be on say DSLRs at the same time. However, you know there are some limitations come with that. But at 68 bucks I don't think that I expected anything different now.
What's interesting however is when we take a closer look at the image quality as we saw it's got a surprisingly good build for the money. It also has a decent optical performance for the money. Starting off we'll look at distortion and vignette.
You can see that distortion. There is a very mild amount of barrel distortion not bad here, However, and even just doing a manual correction which is probably what you're going to end up with I would be surprised if we ever see an actual profile. You see that it corrects easily and I'll show you the settings there.
I use just a +4 for correction. Kind of a mild amount now as far as the vignette I've got a lot dialed in here about two-thirds dialed in and then the midpoint moved all the way over. The one minor thing is that there is an extra amount of vignette in the extreme corner, and so you can pull that on up to a hundred percent what you're going to find is that last little bit it's just quite dark in the extreme corners. The vignette doesn't correct perfectly it's looking at a real-world setting where everything is basically almost monochromatic.
You can see that the vignette is obvious in that situation, and You can see that my correction worked quite well what you can also see is there's just the tiniest bit of vignette in the corners probably not enough to be a real factor.
So, here's a look at the test chart F 1.8 and so we can see that there's a fair bit of contrast and sharpness in the center of the frame. You can see it looks pretty good. You can also see, however, that the zone it starts to drop off a little bit even by the left side of the bill. It's not as strong there as we move off in this direction. You can see a fairly market difference from the left corner to the right bottom corner and then you can see. Once again that we're getting pretty soft towards the extreme corner there and contrast is basically completely shot.
Now stopping down to f/2 point-eight shows that we've got a pretty strong improvement throughout a lot of the frame you can see that there's a notable difference. You can also see looking down towards the corner that if you look no further than about here it's a significant improvement both in the vignette but also the contrast.
The corner is still quite soft. By f/4 we're seeing a you know a very strong amount of sharpness right off until towards the very corner and right very corners they're still softness if you exclude that portion. Everything else is looking really crisp at this point.
Now finally by F 5.6 you can see that our sharpness is pretty much all the way through this bill. It's just down at the very corner that contrast is being lost a little bit, but at this point kind of a landscape aperture we've definitely got acceptable resolution.
This represents our minimum focus distance here and our magnification and so not a particularly high but still good enough to be useful in some situations and we can see at least in the center of the frame that there is a pretty decent amount of sharpness and contrast. It's certainly a usable result now.
For those wondering about putting it on full-frame this shows you how much of the full-frame image circle is covered, and so it's it’s not covering any additional part of the image circle when I crop this down. In fact, I found that I didn't gain anything compared to just shooting it in aps-c mode this shows the same shot in aps-c mode and so I will point out quite good resolution here, it looks nice and crisp rate details. You can see right in that very corner as we saw that resolution disappears in the very corner, but moving out just a tiny bit you can see very strong resolution. You can see it lost right there at the edge of the frame again but quite good in the middle.
There's also an interesting color signature to this lens it produces. I think unique and interesting images. In terms of the bokeh this is not a super high contrast lens wide open and so it makes for again, as I said kind of an interesting signature I actually kind of like this. There's a little bit of vintage effect charm to it. I think will have some applications and could be useful for filmmakers looking for a specific look and so you can see that resolution is fairly good on the plane of focus which is quite small and the bokeh quality is pretty decent.
Here's image that shows that off and so again you know it doesn't like pop off the page but usable amount of resolution but a very nice bokeh quality.
Here's another example here and you know kind of the same truths or he what I will point out is that fringing doesn't look too bad. You can see a little bit of green fringing here but I would say that fringing is not a huge problem with the lens they've done quite a good job with that now.
So, after carefully examining the optical performance my conclusion is that the Pergear 25-millimeter F 1.8 is just barely covering the aps-c frame. I think that this is a lens that probably just like it so obviously overlaps Micro Four Thirds which is even the smaller sensor size but I think that it isn't quite where it's covering aps-c fully.
The reason why I say that is that little bit of lingering vineya in the very extreme corners and the fact that when I went to crop an image from full-frame. I found that I could barely get the same framing as aps-c even by cropping, and so it tells me that that image circle is for aps-c. It's just barely being covered. I think that's also why we see even though the lens gets quite sharp across the frame. Right in those extreme edges there's always that little bit of fall-off and I think that that's probably the real cause right there.
At the same time however if that is not a destructive principle for you. There's really a lot here that I like you know across a lot of the frame the resolution is quite good I think that it has a pretty nice bokeh quality for this kind of focal length.
It's not incredibly high contrast but that gives it a certain charm and a look to images that I suspect some photographers will really like. The fact that it's so small means that it's easy to bring along and whether you use it or you don't use it on a outing you're not going to feel bad for having brought it along.
I think it's also an interesting option as a filmmaker. However, I will point out that everything is pretty close together here and so if you're looking to do any kind of gearing or you probably don't have enough room to do standard gearing and even if you want to you know add something on there a stick to pull focus.
From Dustin Abbott
More Information :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQUlcs8LQMs