Hengyijia 25mm F1.8 (Black) HD.MC Manual Lens for SONY E-mount NEX ILCE Camera

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I guess my problem is more that I can't distinguish when the colored outlines in focus peaking are most "in focus". The outer focusing ring does leave a little to be desired on this diminutive lens - but a bit more practice on my part might help with that. Short pressing the rear wheel zooms into the center of the picture to fine tune the focus — this is one single most important feature for precise manual focusing. Sell the kit you’re not using to MPB. Trade in for the kit you need to create. Buy used, spend less and get more. Buy. Sell. Trade. Create. I haven't really "tested" the bokeh, mainly because that's pretty low on my considerations in lens performance, but what I've seen through the finder has been smooth, with the 12 blade aperture providing those round blobs so many people adore, even when this lens is wide open. I really prefer it not be as crisp as a software corrected AF lens. My primary use is going to result in images where sharpness is not critical because of the image effects involved. Still, having it easily fit into my bag, and knowing it's there for a "regular shoot" such as a concert or other event is a nice option.

Center sharpness is very good even wide open and hard to discern between the 7artisans vs. my Sony FE28mm F2.0. However corners are a complete different story. They are very soft wide open with vignetting and progressively get better to F8 - where it's pretty much gone. The Meike 25/1.8 is OK. I don't like the rendering as much as the 7artisans 25/1.8, but it's capable of getting sharp enough across the field at f/8. My only question is: does anyone know who actually makes Pergear lenses? I've done a bit of research and come up with almost nothing, except for an interesting tidbit: apparently, both Pergear lenses and Brightin Star lenses are, for all intents and purposes, identical.Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more. focusing ring and aperture ring too close together, easy to move aperture ring unintentionally while focusing, the problem is negated with a sugru focusing tab

Colors seem pretty good - nice contrast. You can compare to my FE28F2.8 and 18-105 in a follow-up post. Seems to do well with CA - probably better than the 18-105 zoom. There is some barrel distortion. Also it does flare if you shoot at an angle to the sun. in extremely sunny weather it seems to be sometimes difficult to see what’s in focus and what’s not. I had this problem particularly on snow — snow produced a lot of highlights in the viewfinder which is again similar to focus peaking highlights. I mis-focused several images because of this. Split image manual focus assist might be better in this use case. The 25mm 1.8 is about the same size as an Industar 50mm 2.8, for anyone familiar with old Soviet rangefinder lenses, projecting forward slightly more than the width of my X-Pro1 body, with the tapered-in body style of Fuji's 23mm and 35mm f2 native lenses. Operation is better than any Russian lens I've owned, more German in feel than anything. The finish is virtually identical to the X-Pro, and aesthetically a good match. I use the 7Artisans on my X-E3. It's light, small enough & sharp when stopped down slightly. Very good for street photography.Flare is also very well suppressed, no doubt thanks to good lens barrel design as well as the well established Super EBC coating technology. With all that said, manual focusing is quite enjoyable. As I understand this is a big difference compared to the first generation where the focusing ring placement made manual focusing awkward. I also think lenses like this mark a new era in affordable, quality manual focus lenses with native mirrorless camera lens mounts. A great era we live in.