Introduction

Thypoch is a new manufacturer of photography lenses and entered the market at the end of 2023 with two M-mount lenses, the Simera 28mm 1.4 and 35mm 1.4. There are a lof of 35mm 1.4 lenses for M-mount, but only a handful of 28mm 1.4s, so I am very curious what this final production model of the 28mm 1.4 is capable of.

This lens is also part of my Comparison of Fast 28mm Fullframe Lenses.

Sample Images

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

Specifications

The Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 has the following specifications:

• • Diameter: 59 mm
  • Field of view: 75° (diagonally)
  • Length: 55 mm
  • Weight: 331g (without hood and caps)
  • Filter Diameter: 49 mm
  • Number of Aperture Blades: 14 (rounded)
  • Elements/Groups: 11/7
    
  • Close Focusing Distance: 0.40 m
  • Maximum Magnification: 1:12.8 (measured)
  • Mount: Leica M

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Disclosure

Beginning of 2024 I received a pre production sample of this 28mm 1.4, that was also part of my Fast Fullframe 28mm Comparison. In some areas this pre production sample did not perform up to the manufacturer’s expectations, so in April 2024 I received a loaner of a final production model.

Handling/Build Quality

This Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 features a depth of field scale design Alpa introduced in 1951 under the name “Visifocus”: instead of simple bars or lines we see these red dots that “light up” when changing the aperture setting. At first sight this does look pretty cool, but then I can not remember the last time I actually used a depth of field scale, because it simply isn’t accurate enough on high resolution digital cameras.

What is more important, this design takes up a lot of space and has ultimately led to a very narrow focus ring. This focus ring is therefore also situated very close to the camera and not that easy to get a hold on. Quite often I reached for the wider aperture ring instead, as this is where you would expect the focus ring to be.
What I like about the focus ring is that it has a distinct click stop at the 0.7 m setting, so you will notice leaving the rangefinder-coupled range.
The rotation angle between 0.7 m and the minimum focus distance is really short though, which makes the lens very hard to focus at closer distances.

The aperture ring features a small de-click lever at the bottom. Its resistance is high, so I don’t think there is a high likelihood to accidentally change its setting. The stops are not spaced equidistantly and the click stops are also a bit random – 1/3rd of a stop clicks between f/1.4 and f/4.0, half stops between f/4.0 and f/8.0, full stops between f/8.0 and f/16 – which makes figuring out how far you stopped the lens down going by the clicks and without looking at it also rather difficult.

Unfortunately these lenses also feature an infinity lock similar to those found on old Leica lenses as well as e.g. the TTArtisan 28mm 5.6 or the Canon 50mm 1.4 LTM.
I have absolutely no idea who is a fan of those and who thought it was a good idea to include them in a modern lens. Personally I always find them to get in the way of my shooting and I find it very annoying to have to push that hard-to-reach-button first, to focus at closer distances, when the lens was set to infinity before.

All the markings are engraved and filled with paint. Some of the writings do look a bit cramped together though, less would have probably been more here.

While the inside of the hood is painted matte black, this 28mm features a shiny front ring similar to some Voigtländer lenses. These reflective front rings can lead to additional unwanted flare artefacts.

The Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 is not a small lens, as can be seen from the comparison above it is slightly bigger than the Voigtländer VM 35mm 1.2 III Nokton and the Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton. On the other hand it does feature a floating elements design and is still noticeably smaller than the two recent Cosina lenses with a floating elements design, the Voigtländer VM 21mm 1.4 Nokton and the VM 50mm 1.0 Nokton.

Vignetting

Light falloff

The vignetting figures are very typical for a fast yet compact 28 M-mount lens.

The 7Artisans 28mm 1.4 shows a bit less vignetting at f/1.4 to f/2.0, but the same amount further stopped down. The Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton shows slightly higher vignetting at f/1.4 to f/2.0, but also the same further stopped down.

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.

The 28mm 1.4 shows a comparably low amount of optical vignetting. It does slightly better here than the 7Artisans 28mm 1.4 and way better than any of the Voigtländer 28mm lenses I tried so far (f/1.5, f/1.9, f/2.0 MK I and f/2.0 MK II). Onion ring structures caused by the aspherical elements can be visible though.

The very high optical vignetting has always been one of the few things that bothered me about most of the recent Voigtländer lenses, it is nice to see a manufacturer going for a different approach here.

Sharpness

Focus Shift

With some lenses the point of optimal focus shifts on stopping down. This 28mm 1.4 does not show any field relevant focus shift.

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

On the Leica M10 this 28mm 1.4 shows a very good performance. There is a hint of a midzone dip at f/1.4 and f/2.0 and slightly lower contrast in the corners, but I actually wouldn’t mind using these aperture settings for infinity shooting if needed. Best across frame performance is reached somewhere between f/5.6 and f/8.0.

If we compare it to the Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton (which I did here) we see they do actually perform very similar here. Up to f/4.0 I tend to say the Voigtländer shows better defined corners, but these are differences that will only ever be visible in a direct comparison and are hardly field relevant.

On the Sony A7rII with its thick filter stack the situation looks very different. The midframe needs f/5.6 to look decent, the corners look best at f/11 but still not that great.

portrait distance (24mp Leica M10, 24mp Sony A7III)

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 24mp Sony A7III and the Leica M10. Both cameras do not have an anti aliasing filter in front of the sensor. Focus distance was 0.9 m.

Leica M10 <—> Sony A7III

The Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 is clearly optimized for the thin filter stack of Leica cameras, as it should be the case. As we can see from these crops, in the outer midframe area it performs way better on the Leica camera.

This 28mm shows a very good performance everywhere in the frame already at f/1.4 on the Leica with only minimal softness and astigmatism, which puts it clearly above the 7Artisans 28mm 1.4 and also the Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton (see comparison here). As Fred Miranda showed here, that the Leica 28mm 1.4 and the Voigtländer 28mm 1.5 perform pretty much the same in this regard, this Thypoch 28mm 1.4 is the clear winner among all the fast 28mm M-mount lenses in this – at least for me – very important category.

close (42mp Sony A7rII)

This Thypoch 28mm 1.4 features a floating elements design, so despite its comparably short minimum focus distance we should expect good performance at wider apertures here.

The images are a bit soft at the maximum aperture and stopping down 1-2 stops increases contrast and resolution noticeably. This is still a good performance.

Flare resistance

If you are a regular reader you already know: evaluating the flare resistance of lenses is not an easy endeavour. The short amount of time I got to spend with these lenses so far and the weather conditions also didn’t help. So keep in mind, these are first impressions.

With the 28mm it is possible to encounter all kinds of artefacts with a strong point light source inside or outside the frame. Even sensor reflections were among those, which may point to not so great coatings on the rear element. Let’s hope the final production models of this lens show an improved performance here.

Coma

The Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 shows noticeable Coma at f/1.4, but the artefacts are comparably small. Stopping down to f/2.0 is sufficient to get rid of the “wings”, but for perfectly clean corners it stopping down to f/5.6 is needed. The Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton looks worse at f/2.0, but better at f/4.0.

Distortion

The Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 only shows a low amount of slightly wavy distortion. There is no correction profile available yet, luckily I did not feel the need to correct the distortion in any of the sample pictures

Bokeh

This Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 was part of my Fast 28mm Fullframe Lenses Comparison and it compares very favourably to the other fast 28mm lenses when it comes to the bokeh rendering.

A minimum focus distance of 0.4 m is decent albeit not class leading for a fast 28mm lens. It surely does allow for taking some interesting close up shots and in these situations you will encounter smoothly blurred backgrounds.

Good news for longer focus distances: optical vignetting is not that strong and field curvature is well corrected, leading to very pleasing bokeh here as well. Therefore I greatly prefer this Simera’s performance to that of the Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton in this category.

Unlike the Voigtländer and Leica lenses this Simera 28mm 1.4 uses 14 rounded aperture blades, so highlights stay perfectly round on stopping down.

Sunstars

Due to the high number of rounded aperture blades I did not expect to see distinct sunstars, but the production tolerances for the diaphragms seem to be pretty tight, as we see nice sunstars with an even length of the rays with both lenses from f/5.6 to f/16. I hope to see this diaphragm construction in many future lenses, as it strikes a great balance between creating naturally round out of focus highlights stopped down and distinct sunstars.
If you want to know more about sunstars have a look at this article.

Chromatic aberration

lateral

This Thypoch Simera 28mm 1.4 shows only minimal lateral CA.

longitudinal

This 28mm 1.4 shows an average amount of bokeh fringing, meaning green outlining in the background and magenta outlining in the foreground. Stopping down to f/2.0 is also not sufficient to completely get rid of it.

After having done a side-by-side comparison as a part of my Fast 28mm Comparison I can tell you this Thypoch does a bit better in this category than the Voigtländer VM 28mm 1.5 Nokton. Interestingly it looks like the 7Artisans 28mm 1.4 shows the least outlining of all the 28mm 1.4 M-mount lenses.

Conclusion

In terms of optical performance I really like this Simera 28mm 1.4. The combination of bokeh quality and contrast at f/1.4 is exactly what I like to see in a lens like this for creating environmental portraits and for that use case I would prefer it over the Voigtländer 28mm f/1.5 to f/2.0 lenses as well as the 7Artisans 28mm 1.4 and the Leica 28mm 1.4. This Simera also features a generous 0.4 m minimum focus distance and more appealing sunstars than the 7Artisans 28mm 1.4. With their 14 rounded aperture blades Thypoch actually managed to combine nicely round out of focus highlights stopped down and appealing sunstars.

Sadly I have less positive things to say about the handling experience (as was already the case for the Thypoch Simera 35mm 1.4). The lens is hard to focus at short distances due to the very short throw of the focus ring in this distance range and because of it being too narrow and very close to the camera, the focus ring is generally unpleasant to use. The infinity lock is also super annoying and constantly got in the way. I think there is a good reason most manufacturers decided to ditch those some 60 years ago.

This review deserves to end on a positive note though. For one of their first entries in the world of photography lenses, Thypoch did an amazingly good job here. I may not be happy with all their mechanical designs decisions, but the optics are great, as they lead to the best bokeh rendering of all the fast 28mm M-mount lenses. It even manages to compete with the much bigger and more complex non-M-mount lenses as I have shown here. If that isn’t impressive, I don’t know what is.

buy from ebay.com | ebay.de | B&H (affiliate links) for $699

Alternatives

You can find all my reviews of 28mm M-mount lens reviews here, so I will only talk about the most obvious alternatives in more detail. I also compared this Thypoch to five other fast 28mm lenses here.

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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