TTArtisan, one of the Chinese lens manufacturers known for its consistent quality, has primarily produced full metallic, manual focus lenses. However, they have recently released a few autofocus lenses. Their latest creation is the AF 56mm f/1.8 ED, a compact APS-C portrait lens. Let’s take a closer look at it!
Continue reading Review: TTArtisan AF 56mm f/1.8 ED – Small Portrait Lens with Great Potential
We have seen a few exciting lenses from Laowa in recent years, especially in their Argus product line, which seems to be Laowa’s premium line of lenses. The one here, Laowa Argus 25mm f/0.95 CF APO is one of them. A manual focus “standard/wide-angle” lens for APS-C cameras with an ultra-fast maximum aperture of f/0.95. It has an unusual focal length of 25mm (fullframe equivalent of 37.5mm*), between the more usual 23mm and 27mm focal lengths (FF equivalents of 35mm and 40mm*). The 0.95 aperture promises impressive and nice background separation and hopefully a nice bokeh and extreme low-light capabilities. Besides, the APO designation indicates Laowa has used its APO technology in this lens and it should give much better correction of spherical and chromatic aberrations than non-APO lenses. Let’s see how good it is in the real world!
* The fullframe equivalent focal length of 37.5mm is true for Sony, Nikon, and Fujifilm cameras, while on a Canon APS-C, it will be equivalent to a 40mm lens on a fullframe camera.
I tested this lens on a Nikon Zfc
You can see this review a YouTube video here
Continue reading Review: Laowa Argus 25mm f/0.95 CF APO (APS-C)
The Viltrox AF 85mm f/1.8 STM ED IF Z mount is an autofocus mid-range telephoto, which is popular for portrait photography on full-frame cameras. Viltrox originally made this lens for Sony E-mount cameras, but later they managed to improve and produce it also for Fuji X, Nikon Z, and Canon RF mounts. Viltrox is the only manufacturer that has been able to produce Nikon Z mount lenses with full lens-camera communication and autofocus in the most common focal lengths. 85mm is a focal length that seems easier for manufacturers to design and make lenses with good optical qualities. There are quite a number of those nice and sharp lenses available and it seems that the price, in relation to how good/fast they are, goes up exponentially. Let’s see how good Viltrox has done with this one!
As you may or may not know we have several guides on fullframe E-mount lenses:
Keeping these guides up to date takes a lot of time but I nevertheless try to do it on a yearly basis.
That time has come again so I just spent about 3 weeks doing exactly that, this means many new lenses have been added and the prices and also the recommendations for many lenses have been updated.
A few days ago I asked you what you think would be a good platform to get announcements about new posts any maybe also start discussions or simply chatting.
Discord was mentioned quite often in your comments. I did some research – as I didn’t know much about it – and it does indeed offer some features I was looking for. I also like that it is you who decides what you want to see and not some algorithm. So I set up a phillipreeve.net Discord server where already some of you joined.