hey YouTube it's GxAce here with a quick review of the 7artisans
50-millimeter 1.1 Lens for Leica M-Mount. This lens is pretty interesting, it's a
$370 M-Mount 50-millimeter 1.1 lens
which is pretty crazy. It's made by a Chinese company in Shenzhen called
7artisans. They have a line of a few lenses that are all ridiculously
low-priced. Build quality is fantastic, it feels like
a Leica-made lens. It feels like it's made out of brass it's actually made out
of anodized aluminum. Finish is awesome it matches the Leica M6 pretty closely.
Looks really cool on this camera. The lens clicks into place really solidly so
there isn't any kind of like manufacturing flaws in my copy of the
lens. I've heard some other reviews on Amazon talking about poor build quality
like quality control with you know some of the aperture ring like coming loose and like
falling off or something I mean this one feels as high quality as the
Voigtlander lenses that I have. It feels pretty substantial in the hand which is
awesome. The aperture is very smooth moving, the focus is extremely smooth,
definitely yeah feels high quality. The lens actually comes pretty decently
packed. The box looks pretty nice and the logo in the front with a red seven on it. The
lens package inside of laser-cut foam so it's pretty nice when you open it up
inside the box there's a focusing chart and a little screw driver that's
actually there to give you the option to calibrate the back or front focus. If you
have any issues with those there's instructions in Chinese and English.
Comes with a little screw driver for doing that as well too. My package came
with a little focusing tab that's adhesive that you can stick on the lens
similar to other rangefinder lenses. It also comes with a metal friction-fit
lens cap that has the logo on the front and feels very high quality too. So this
lens is 50-millimeter 1.1 it goes one point one all the way to f/16. The
aperture ring is be clicked which is kind of nifty kind of sucks depends on
what you use it for. Video it's nice because you can change your aperture
smoothly. Film shooters and people that are using it kind of for photos might
find it annoying because you can't tell by feel what aperture you're at. The
minimum focus distance on this lens is 0.7 meters or 2-feet
There's also a hyper focal distance scale on the on the lens which is really
useful for zone focusing. I was actually pretty surprised by the
image quality of the lens. I wasn't really expecting a whole lot since it's
a kind of a knockoff of a Notcilux but wide open the lens is actually decently
sharp in the center although the corners are pretty soft. The lens sharpens up a
lot even as soon as you get to 1.4 and then quite a bit by 2.8
and f/4. The corners are pretty bad wide open even by f/8 and f/16 the lens
still has a pretty soft corner so as long as you're not framing super far
into the corners it shouldn't be a huge issue because the center does sharpen up
quite a bit. The lens also displays a kind of interesting glowing effect to
some of the highlights that I think is actually pretty cool. So this lens actually
vignettes quite a bit wide open it gets a little bit better by the time you get
to f/4. I've found that using the ZY Optics 50-millimeter lens
calibration preset in Lightroom actually gets me pretty close to adjusting
for the vignetting and the barrel distortion
at f/1.1. When you're at the close focus distance on this lens the
bokeh is kind of crazy it looks busy kind of looks like it's
shooting into the center of the frame like you're zooming a lens in real quick
while you're taking a picture, so it kind of looks like there's motion
pointing towards the center of the frame and it sort of changes depending on the
distance you are from your subject but I guess some people might like and you can
use it creatively but it might be a little intense for everyone
all the time. It's actually a pretty decent lens. I was very surprised I
thought it was going to suck and it kind of didn't, so it's pretty cool.
Yeah $370 for a 50 millimeter lens that goes on Leica M-Mount it it's pretty
cool. so yeah there'll be more videos like this in the future so like and
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