Category Archives: Meta

Meta

Recent Guide Updates

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Recent Guide Updates

Over the past weeks I have been updating all these guides once more. This is always a lot of work and not a lot of fun, so I hope you continue to find them useful. It is now finally the moment to complain that your favorite lens is not included 🙂

I also noticed something rather unusual: new lenses used get cheaper over time, but compared to last year many of the Sony and Sigma lenses saw sometimes massive increases of their MSRP in the US thanks to the tariffs. The prices of the Chinese and Korean lenses are mostly stable, sometimes widening the gap even further. Especially some of the older Sony lenses are really bad deals now.

Supporting Us

This website is advertising free, except for the unobtrusive affiliate links. Please have a look at some of our competitors (e.g. opticallimits, cameralabs, dustinabbott or sonyalpha.blog) and ask yourself if that is the user experience you are looking for, where you cannot change the page even once without a pop up showing up, you have advert bars at the bottom or side and ads are even being scattered across the actual content, so you are more likely to accidentally click on them.

If not, keep in mind you can support us and keep this page advert free by using these donation buttons:

via Paypal (BastianK)
via Paypal (Martin)

Meta, Review

Lenses I would like to Review

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Introduction

There are some lenses I would like to review one day, but the more interesting (read: rare and expensive) they are, the less feasible it is for me to buy them just to write a review.
Thanks to several readers here I already got the opportunity to remove several lenses from this list in the past, but there are still some left:

E-mount:

Sony FE 12-24mm 2.8 GM Review
Sigma 14mm 1.4
Sony FE 14mm 1.8 GM Review
Sigma 17mm 4.0 Review
Samyang 18mm 2.8 AF Review
Sigma 20-200mm 3.5-6.3 C Review
Sony FE 20mm 1.8 G Review
Samyang 24mm 1.8 AF Review
Voigtländer 28mm 2.0 Apo-Lanthar E
Sony FE 28-70mm 2.0 GM
Sigma 28-45mm 1.8
Sigma 35mm 1.2 II
Sigma 50mm 1.2
Sony FE 50-150mm 2.0 GM
Sony FE 50mm 1.4 GM Review
Samyang 50mm 1.4 AF MKII Review
Sony FE 50mm 1.2 GM Review
Sony FE 85mm 1.4 GM MK II Review
Samyang 85mm 1.4 AF MKII
Samyang 135mm 1.8 AF Review

Continue reading Lenses I would like to Review →

Meta, Thypoch

November / Black Friday Deals 2025

5 Comments

Introduction

Christmas is around the corner so everyone wants to sell their goods in November. The industry came up with a bunch of stuff like Single’s Day and Black Friday and many camera and lens manufacturers are also using this opportunity. In this article I will collect the deals I think are actually worthwhile.
Thypoch was the first to start their campaign this year, as soon as others follow this article will be updated.
Update: Amazon/Samyang+Adobe Lightroom added

Adobe Photo Prepaid Abo 1 Year

This year a bit more expensive but with 1 TB instead of 20 GB and still much better than the monthly rate. Probably available on all the European Amazon shops. Here the Link to Amazon.de (affiliate link).

Watch out though: this will not extend your existing 20 GB subscription. Wait until your 20 GB subscription ran out or pause it before redeeming the code for the 1 TB subscription.

Samyang Lenses (US/EU Amazon)

Samyang Remaster Slim lens kit for 169€ on Amazon.de (affiliate link) Review

All the Samyang V-AF lenses are also heavily discounted on Amazon.de (affiliate link) and can be bought for 210 to 300€ each. I bought  the 100mm T2.3 myself to review it. The 24mm T1.9, 35mm T1.9, 45mm T1.9 and 75mm T1.9 seem to be the rehoused non-Cine lenses but they feature nicer casings while often being cheaper, especially true for the nice Samyang AF 24mm 1.8 FE.

The US Amazon offers the Samyang AF 85mm 1.4 II (affiliate link) for $407, which is also a fair price.

Viltrox 

Many of the Viltrox lenses are also discounted on Amazon.de (affiliate link). The 35mm 1.2 LAB for 800€, the new 85mm 2.0 Evo for 250€, the 85mm 1.4 Pro for 535€ are the best deals I noticed, some of the APS-C lenses may also be worth a closer look.

If you are shopping from the US you can also find most Viltrox lenses discounted on Amazon.com (affiliate links) and on B&H (affliliate link), where it seems all lenses are discounted by 20%, so you can for example get the new Viltrox 14mm 4.0 Air for only $159 (affiliate link).

Also the official Viltrox store offers a sitewide 20% discount (affiliate link). Remeber to try using the code “PRnet” for an additional 5%.

Thypoch

The campaign runs from October 22nd until December 3rd.

Pretty much all the Thypoch lenses are discounted in their official Thypoch Webshop (affiliate link) and you can get an additional 5% discount using the code “PRNET”.

I reviewed all of these lenses and there is no stinker among them. The 28mm 1.4, the 50mm 1.4 and the 75mm 1.4 are my favorites and they also made it my list of the Best Fullframe Lenses from China. Sadly the 75mm 1.4 and the 50mm 1.4 only received small discounts, but they were already easy recommendations at full retail.

Laowa

The campaign runs from November 14th until January 2nd.

There are no huge discounts to be found here, but many lenses (not the latest releases though) received a 10% discount in their official Laowa Webshop (affiliate link). If you were already eyeing one of those, now is a good time.

Lenses worth looking at are the 85mm as well as 90mm 2:1 macro lenses and all the shift lenses. A discount for the 15mm 2.0 is also always welcome.

Support Us

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via Paypal (BastianK)
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This site contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase using any of the links marked as affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. This helps support the creation of future content.

Meta, Review

Reviewing Lenses isn’t really worth it

60 Comments

It is this time of the year again. I sadly see many blogs loading their pages with so much advertising these days that it makes it hard to spot the actual content anymore. Some also opted for membership programs like Patreon. We on the other hand always financed this blog exclusively through unobtrusive affiliate links and donations. This is only possible because it is a passion project by people with actual jobs that just happen to love photography.

I still have no intention to add annoying adverts or introducing a membership/Patreon system, as I have always been an advocate of free internet and freely accessible information. I also don’t want to push junk software with high margins that I would never want to use myself or offer questionably useful presets.

This means I have to push this article 1-2 times per year – similar to what Wikipedia is doing every now and then – to reach more people.

There are many articles here that generate zero income: for example the Analogue Adventures and everything from the Technical Knowledge category, as these are not really about a product that could be bought by you. Same is also true for the reviews of simply bad lenses. Why would you buy them through affiliate links if we just told you they suck? 

Affiliate links also don’t work for everyone and every item. If you are not from Canada or the US, B&H is surely less attractive. Many people from Europe don’t like ordering directly from Asia because of import duties and some items may also not be available through our affiliate partners at all.

Thinking of reviews of affordable vintage lenses: if you buy a lens for $50 on eBay, we only get a $1 commission for that. So in these cases, you would do us a bigger favour by donating $5 and buying that lens at a lower price locally (if possible), than using the affiliate links.

If you find yourself in one of these categories – or if you simply want to support us without using affiliate links – you can do that by using this Paypal donate button under our articles:

via Paypal (BastianK)
via Paypal (Martin)

The money you donate will go directly to the author of that article. Even though the blog had two million visitors last year according to our statistics, only around 100 decided to make a donation (you know who you are, thanks a lot for that!), so you can make a real difference here.

And if you often find yourself ordering from one of our affiliates: why not bookmark and use any of our Amazon or eBay links as starting point for your purchases? It won’t cost you anything extra and helps us a lot. It doesn’t matter what you order, whether it is photography related or not, as long as you clicked on one of the links first.

Some articles highlighting the work we do here you might have missed:
Different Filter Stacks and what they mean for us: Sony E | Nikon Z | Leica M | Kolari UT
Comparison: Super Fast 35mm f/0.95 | f/1.2 Fullframe Lenses
Sony FE Lenses: The honest Guide for the A7/A9/A1 Series

And some quirky and rare lenses you won’t find being reviewed this thorough anywhere else:
Review: TTArtisan 75mm f/1.5 – A Modern and Affordable Zeiss Biotar 75/1.5?
Review: Laowa 8-15mm f/2.8 FF Zoom Fisheye
Review: SLRmagic 50mm 0.95 Hyperprime LM
Review: Nikon 200mm 2.0 IF-ED Ai – The first of its Kind

Meta

Site Update: Gallery

9 Comments

The header bar has a new category called “Gallery”, you can also go there directly here.

This is for those of you that are mainly here for the pictures and less so for the lenses. I am starting with 9 different galleries and before extending those, I first want to see what the feedback looks like. 

So drop a message in the comment section, especially if you encounter any kind of issues.