Introduction

While some lens manufacturers strive for optical perfection, others decide to offer lenses with more “character” – often based on famous lenses from the past. This Artizlab 35mm 1.4 Classic is one such lens. From the outside it looks like the Leica 35mm 1.4 Summilux from 1960 and while featuring a different optical design, it is certainly undercorrected for many aberrations, creating a distinct look. Whether you like that look or not is a different question though. So let’s try to answer it with the help of this review.

Sample Images

You can find most of the sample pictures in this article in full resolution here.

Specifications

• • Diameter: 28 mm
  • Length: 52 mm
  • Weight: 157g (without hood[16g] and caps)
  • Filter Diameter: proprietary filter inspired by Series VII
  • Number of Aperture Blades: 10 (straight)
  • Elements/Groups: 8/6
  • Close Focusing Distance: 1.0 m
  • Maximum Magnification: 1:23 (measured)
  • Mount: Leica M

buy from Funleader shop (use code “PRnet” for a 5% discount) | ebay.com (affiliate links) for $500

Disclosure

Our reader Moritz sent me this lens for a review. Thanks a lot!

Handling/Build Quality

From the outside this Artzilab 35mm 1.4 Classic looks just like an old Leica lens and also feels well made. All the markings are engraved and filled with paint and font as well as color look very similar to an original Leica lens to me.

The focus ring has a nice resistance and turns about 90° from the minimum focus distance of 1.0 m to infinity.

A focus tab with built-in infinity lock is also included. It feels exactly the same as the one I have seen on some of the Light Lens Lab lenses (35mm 2.0 8e and 28mm 2.8 9e). As you know I am not a fan of these infinity locks as they always get in the way of my shooting and I hardly see any benefit in having them.

The aperture ring features distinct and equidistantly spaced half-stop click stops and features a similar design as that of other compact M-mount lenses like the Voigtländer VM 40mm 1.4 Nokton or the Leica/Minolta 40mm 2.0.

The lens brings up the correct frameline pair and without the hood there is hardly any rangefinder blockage. The hood surely changes that, it can be positioned smarter than I did here though.

The lens ships with a round vented hood but what it lacks is a filter thread. Only a proprietary UV filter can apparently be clamped between the hood and the lens itself.

There are also no holes to easily 6-bit-code this lens to be found on the bayonet.

Being an M-mount lens this Artizlab 35mm 1.4 Classic can be adapted to pretty much all the current mirrorless systems.

Vignetting

Light falloff

With a 35mm lens this small I expected huge vignetting figures and while I cannot – by any means – call almost 3 EV little, it is actually less than I was expecting.

Keep in mind Leica’s latest 35mm 1.4 Asph FLE MK II shows almost 4 EV at its maximum aperture and also the Thypoch 35mm 1.4 Simera shows slightly more corner shading than this small Artizlab 35mm 1.4.

It is recommended to have a look at this article first to get an idea how this brightness graph works.

Optical vignetting

Fast lenses usually show a significant amount of optical vignetting. Without going too much into technical details optical vignetting leads to the truncation of light circles towards the borders of the frame.
In the center of the frame almost every lens will render a perfect circle, but only lenses with very low optical vignetting will keep this shape in the corners.
So in the following comparison we move from the center (left) to the extreme corner (right) and see how the shape of the light circle changes.

Oh boy. This is the weirdest result I came across in this category so far. Massive optical vignetting and field curvature and Astigmatism and Coma can be seen here. Even the weirdest tiny MS-Optics lens (looking at you, 35mm 1.3 Slim) does not look this bad.

After having used more than 300 lenses it is nice there are still lenses that surprise me, not all of those surprises are positive though and this one most certainly wasn’t.

Sharpness

Focus Shift

With some lenses the point of optimal focus shifts on stopping down. This 35mm 1.4 shows one of the strongest focus shifts I ever came across. There is only a small shift from f/1.4 to f/2.0, but when stopping down from f/2.0 to f/2.8 the focus shifts 3 cm to the back and on stopping down to f/4.0 another 3 cm. If you want to use this lens on a rangefinder camera in the f/2.8 to f/5.6 range I wish you lots of luck.

infinity (24mp Leica M10, 42mp Sony A7rII)

Because of the strong focus shift I adjusted focus for every shot here.

With its rather simple optical design reminiscent of lenses from the 1960s we shouldn’t expect great contrast or a flat field at wider apertures.

At f/1.4 the lens is generally soft, the farther you move away from the center of the frame, the softer it gets.

You may wonder why the midframe looks worse at f/2.8, this is because I adjusted the center for focus shift and apparently the shape of the field curvature also changes on stopping down. This is actually not the first time I have seen this, the Light Lens Lab 35mm 2.0 8e shows the same behaviour.

If you are looking for best corner to corner performance you should definitely stop down to f/11.

This lens doesn’t perform much different on the Sony A7rII with its thick filter stack. When it comes to the midframe it actually looks better than on the Leica, but I guess this is just a coincidence.

portrait distance 1.0 m (24mp Leica M10)

I refocused for every shot and aperture to get the best possible result at different locations in the frame (center, inner midframe and outer midframe).
The circle of the dollar bill is more or less the size of a human eye.

We will be looking at 100% crops from the Leica M10.

f/1.4 <—> f/2.0

The manufacturer claims the lens has been optimized for central sharpness and going by what we see here that seems to be the case, as in the center there is only a minor difference between the performance at f/1.4 and f/2.0.

Towards the outer midframe the lens surely gets softer at f/1.4, stopping down to f/2.0 improves the performance significantly.

If we compare the performance to the Light Lens Lab 35mm 2.0 8e, they actually look similar at f/2.0. The Thypoch 35mm 1.4 Simera with its way more complex optical design unsurprisingly is a lot sharper at f/1.4.

Flare resistance

If you are a regular reader you already know: evaluating the flare resistance of lenses is not an easy endeavour as a slight change in scenario can have a huge impact on the performance.

While Light Lens Lab usually sticks to single coating, Artizlab decided to go for multi coating here. But is that alone enough for creating a flare resistant lens?

At f/1.4 we see some internal reflections manifesting itself as ring flares. Veiling flare with the sun outside the frame is also present.

Stopped down the performance is much better. I did not encounter any ghosts here, only with the sun close to the corner (where many lenses struggle) I managed to create some veiling flare. When using a camera with liveview this can be easily avoided by slightly reframing.

Coma

Correcting Coma well is generally not something I would associate with these all spherical compact 35mm 1.4 double gauss designs, but this Artizlabs 35mm 1.4 is about as bad as it gets, creating some of the biggest artefacts I came across so far.

When there are some point light sources in the frame this will be something very hard to overlook, even in low resolution pictures.

Do as I say, not as I do, meaning: bring a tripod and stop down if you want to take some blue hour pictures with this lens.

Distortion

This 35mm 1.4 shows a notable amount of barrel distortion. It is mostly uniform so can be corrected pretty well by dialing in +5 in Photoshop/Lightroom and I did that for many of the sample pictures in this review.

Bokeh

I really like to use fast 35mm lenses for environmental portraiture and other shallow depth of field applications, hence I care a lot about the bokeh qualities of these lenses. Here there are a few issues though.

The first issue is the long minimum focus distance of 1.0 m. The sample above has been taken at the minimum focus distance, so this is like the maximum amount of bokeh you can possibly create.

The other issue is the combination of crazy high optical vignetting, unfavourable field curvature and general softness at f/1.4.

In the picture above you can see how much the bokeh changes between center and edges. While it looks decent in the central part of the frame, there is hardly any left in the corners.

If you take pictures of bigger objects from a bit farther away, the background is only barely out of focus – almost unnoticeable in these small resolution pictures.

This picture of the mannequin again shows what optical vignetting and field curvature do to the bokeh. The buildings on the right in the background are far far behind the shops in the central part of the frame, yet they are noticeably less out of focus. This is not a look I personally find particularly appealing. Some people think this creates some kind of 3D effect (while I think the complete opposite is the case), so your mileage may vary here.

If you are looking for fast 35mm M-mount lenses that creates a more natual bokeh have a look at e.g. the Voigtländer VM 35mm 1.2 Nokton III or the Thypoch 35mm 1.4 Simera.

Sunstars

This Artizlab features an aperture diaphragm made of 10 straight aperture blades. It looks to me as if the rays here have slightly uneven lengths, so they are not as well defined as those coming from the Voigtländer or Zeiss lenses that also feature 10 aperture blades.
If you want to know more about sunstars have a look at this article.

Chromatic aberration

lateral

This lens shows only a very low amount of lateral CA.

longitudinal

At the maximum aperture the spherical aberration masks the bokeh fringing a bit, so when stopping down to f/2.0 it becomes more obvious and we can clearly see green and magenta outlining. Stopping down to f/2.8 is also not enough to get rid of this aberration.

Conclusion

We need to talk about expectation managment here. Because, depending on what you expect of this lens, it might be exactly what you are looking for or the complete opposite of that.

As said at the beginning of this review this Artizlab 35mm 1.4 has been inspired by the Leica 35mm 1.4 from the 1960s. Unlike the Light Lens Lab lenses this is not a direct replica though and from direct comparisons I have seen its rendering and bokeh differs significantly from the Leica lens.

This leaves me wondering a bit, but then the Zeiss ZM 50mm 1.5 C-Sonnar, TTArtisan 75mm 1.5 “Biotar” or the Voigtländer 50mm 1.5 Heliar Classic follow a similar concept.

The “Classic” designation is well deserved. This lens has a lot of undercorrected (or uncorrected) aberrations: strong focus shift, very strong Coma, some spherical aberration – to only name a few. The flare resistance has surely been improved compared to those vintage lenses thanks to multi coating though.

Mechanically the lens feels quite nice, but also here I would have wished for some improvements: no infinity lock, better minimum focus distance and a filter thread.

In the end the conclusion is a simple one: if you are looking for a “character” lens – some may simply say a lens with lots of aberrations – and you like how the images taken with this lens turn out due to these aberrations, this lens is for you. If that isn’t the case it will be very hard to ignore some of its glaring flaws and you would surely be better off with one of the alternatives.

buy from Funleader shop (use code “PRnet” for a 5% discount) | ebay.com (affiliate links) for $500

Alternatives

I already reviewed a lot of fast 35mm lenses for M-mount. You can find all their reviews here. There are some notable alternatives to have a closer look at here though:

Voigtlander VM 35mm 1.5 Nokton:
If you are looking for a fast yet compact M-mount lens with a “modern” rendering this is the one you should have a closer look at. It is only 35g heavier but offers way better image quality and handling. A 0.5 instead of 1.0 m minimum focus distance and a normal filter thread.
buy from amazon.com | amazon.de | ebay.com | ebay.de | B&H for about $799 (affiliate links)

Voigtländer VM 40mm 1.4 Nokton:
If you are okay with 40 instead of 35mm this Voigtländer lens also offers a bit of a “classic” rendering. It offers better build quality and handling, higher contrast, better flare resistance, a little less field curvature and a better minimum focus distance. I also like its bokeh rendering more. It is only 37g heavier and can often be found for less money than this Artizlab lens.
buy from amazon.com | ebay.com | ebay.de | B&H (affiliate links) starting at $300

Light Lens Lab 35mm 2.0 8e:
While only an f/2.0 lens, this Light Lens Lab lens performs similar in many categories. This is not too surprising, as it is a direct replica of the Leica 35mm 2.0 from the 1960s. I found its contrast to be a bit higher and it offers a 0.7 m minimum focus distance, it only features single coating though, so it is more prone to showing lens flares.
buy from official homepage | ebay.com (affiliate links) starting at $1049

Sample Images

You can find most of the sample pictures in this article in full resolution here.

Further Reading

• All M-mount Lens Reviews
• Lens aberrations explained
• Review: Laowa 28mm 1.2 Argus
• Review: Laowa 35mm 0.95 Argus
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BastianK

My name is Bastian and I am your expert here when it comes to ultra wide angle lenses, super fast portrait lenses (ranging from a 50mm f/0.95 to a 200mm f/1.8) and I also have reviewed way too many 35mm lenses. Don't ask me anything about macro or wildlife shooting though.

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