A good macro lens opens up a whole new world of photographic possibilities, but it also represents a very niche area of photography. Some people are born macro photographers; it’s their favorite type of photography. Others don’t mind dabbling in it, but aren’t so invested that they are interested in spending a thousand dollars on a lens that they will mostly use for one specific kind of photography. That’s what makes lenses like the Pergear 100mm F2.8 2x Macro interesting. They promise the ability to create those amazing macro images while not breaking the bank to do so. The Pergear 100M costs about $270, making it far more tempting to add to the casual macro photographer’s kit. But does cheap in price also mean cheap in quality? That’s what we are here to explore (which you can do in either my video review, linked below, or by reading on in this text review.)

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Thanks to Pergear for sending me a review loaner of this lens.   As always, this is a completely independent review.  All opinions and conclusions are my own. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the 45MP Nikon Z8, which I reviewed here.

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I like reviewing macro lenses in the winter, as macro photography is one of the easiest kinds of photography to do indoors. You can take ordinary household items and create extraordinary images by getting in close.

Several years ago I reviewed the Laowa APO 100mm F2.8 2X Macro, and in many ways the Pergear 100M seems like it was inspired by the lens. They both have a long slender profile (Laowa on left, Pergear on right), a similar focal length, and even a similar functional design where the focusing groups move obviously forward and backwards inside but without the external length changing.

The Laowa is more expensive but also much better optically, as we will see, but there’s a lot of physical similarities.

I like to utilize macro lenses for doing my product photography, as often there will be fine details that I want to capture than ordinary lenses won’t magnify enough. I’ve used the Pergear 100M for a number of the product photography sessions for lens reviews.

There’s some debate about which focal length is best for a macro lens, but suffice it to say that the 90-105mm range is probably the most popular, landing the Pergear 100M right in the sweet spot for macro photography. Let’s dive deeper.

Build and Handling

The Pergear 100M is a manual only lens. There is no autofocus, no electronic contacts, and both focus and aperture will need to be manually controlled. The upside for a macro lens is that many macro photographers prefer manual focus for macro anyway, and it also means that it is pretty simple for Pergear to offer the lens in a variety of lens mounts. I’m reviewing on Nikon Z mount, but it is also available for Sony E, Canon RF, Leica L, Canon EF(don’t often see that anymore!), and Fuji X (an APS-C only system, so the lens will have an effective focal length of 150mm there). The lens can also be used on the APS-C/DX versions of these mounts, where the effective focal length will be magnified by the crop factor of that camera.

As noted, this is a very long and slender lens. It is just 71mm (2.79″) in diameter, but a whopping 157.8mm (6.2″) in length. It weighs in at a fairly hefty 814g (28.7oz) on my scale.

The front filter threads are a common 67mm.

One design element I do prefer about the Pergear over the Laowa is that the Laowa experimented with having an included filter become the front element. I didn’t like this design, and they went away from it with the subject 90mm APO F2.8 2x Macro that came out the next year. The Pergear uses a traditional glass element there instead, and the focusing group of elements moves back and forth behind that front element. When at macro distances the focusing elements come right up to that front element, as seen here:

When you focus to infinity, that focusing group will retract quite deeply into the lens barrel, as you can see here.

There is no lens hood included, and while adding one would obviously expand the length of the lens, the lens is a bit flare prone, and a hood could prove useful.

The build quality actually feels quite nice. It’s a hefty lens, but that’s in large part because everything is made of metal and glass, with a nice anodized satin finish to the barrel and with markings nicely etched into it.

This is a fully manual lens, so no electronics. Both focus and aperture control will be manual via the rings. The aperture ring comes first, and while it is marked at the traditional full stops, the mechanism is clickless, allowing you to move smoothly through the whole aperture range. This can be useful for focus racks during video capture, though I find the weight of both rings definitely on the heavy side, which would make racking a little more difficult.

Between the aperture and focus rings are hyperfocal scales.

The aperture iris itself has a high blade count of 13 blades, which allows it to remain circular even when the lens is stopped down.

The manual focus ring is nicely wide and ribbed in metal, but I have a few complaints here. First of all is the weight of the focus action, which is unnecessarily heavy. I had a similar observation about the first Zeiss 100mm Makro-Planar that I reviewed, but unlike that lens, this is an internally focusing lens and so that extra weight just feels unnecessary.

My second complaint is about the focus throw, or available rotation. There is about 130° of focus travel, which isn’t bad, but only about 15° of rotation is available to cover the whole distance from 1 meter (3 feet) to infinity. This makes focus in that range extremely difficult, as even the slightest movement causes focus to be completely off. It’s unfortunate, as you really need that precision when using a manual focus lens.

There are no switches or dials on the barrel of the lens; the only features are the two rings.

Minimum focus distance is 30cm, and you can achieve an extremely high 2:1 (2.0x) magnification at that distance. You’ll have about 12cm of distance between the front of the lens and the subject at that level of magnification.

I wish the manual focus ring were a little better executed, but overall this feels like a nicely made lens for the money.

Manual Focus on Nikon

Manual focus is an overall positive experience on my Nikon Z8. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Clear, useful EVF. On paper, the EVF of the Z8 is nothing special, but, in practice, it works very well. I’ve got much higher resolution viewfinders on Sony cameras, but Sony viewfinders do some weird things when the shutter is half depressed. And I typically want the shutter half depressed when manually focusing, as this helps stabilize the viewfinder while I focus. Nikon’s viewfinder is clear and makes it easy to see focus moving as I turn the manual focus ring.
2. Effective IBIS (VR). I’ve been impressed with the real world stability of Nikon’s in camera VR. It works effectively and allows for both a stable viewfinder experience as a I focus and also stable results when I take the shot. To my knowledge, no manual focus lens to this point has included lens-based image stabilization, so having effective in-camera stabilization is very important.
3. Useful manual focus aids. There are three primary manual focus aids that I’ve utilized when manually focusing, including the onscreen focus confirmation box (put it where you want focus to be, and it will turn green when proper focus has been achieved), magnification of the image to visually confirm focus, and focus overlays (peaking). With some lenses Nikon includes a directional arrow that points you the direction you need to turn the focus ring to focus in the right direction, but that isn’t always the case. I’ve found that the focus box is quite accurate, though, and it makes manual focus fairly easy.

The Pergear 100M is a purely manual lens, with no electronics, and that subtly changes the calculus, however. On the positive side, Nikon is unique among the brands I test in allowing one to manually create some proper metadata for a lens. You can manually input the lens name, focal length, and maximum aperture. This not only helps with VR (the camera knows the proper focal length), but also helps images to be sorted properly in your editing software because that name transfers in the EXIF data. Note the information given to my image in Lightroom:

The good news there is that I can search for images with that name designation rather than them all falling under the “unknown” category. I can even sort them by the proper focal length. What won’t always be properly reported, however, is the aperture. It will always be F2.8, which means that sometimes that will be right and in other cases very wrong.

On the negative side of the equation, the lack of electronic means that A) you will get no automatic magnification of the focus area when you start to manually focus and B) Nikon’s innovative focus guide won’t work. I don’t love Nikon’s manual zoom function, so I don’t love the manual focus process quite as much here. That isn’t helped by a not having enough rotation for easy focus beyond the macro range.

Image Quality Breakdown

The Pergear 100mm F2.8 2x Macro has an optical design of 14 elements in 9 groups, though I was unable to source whether or not any of those elements are of the exotic variety. The MTF chart shows a performance that varies somewhat according to the focus distance. Peak performance seems to come at the 2:1 level.

It is possible to get great looking macro shots with the Pergear 100M, but there are a few negative factors that can influence those results. The most obvious of those is flare related issues. The contrast of the Pergear 100M is easily impacted by backlighting. In the comparison below, I show a scene that is light from both sides, but in the first example there is no backlighting source, while in the second shot I add a backlight. You can see just how much the contrast is reduced in the second example.

And it isn’t just backlighting. It’s pretty easy for glowing effects or light leaks to end up in your images even if the light source isn’t actually in frame. You can see from these product shots of the Sirui Aurora 85mm that various light leaks can be pretty common.

Now perhaps you say, “I like that look!”, and that’s a valid perspective. But it is definitely true that you’ll have to be very careful and intentional about how you use light, because this lens is very flare prone.

I was also testing the Laowa Tilt/Shift 55mm F2.8 Macro at the same time, and I did a comparison shot between the two with a Christmas decoration that was flooded with directional light from a window behind it. You can see that the Pergear image is flooded with veiling and prismatic haze, while the Laowa and its superior coatings is essentially unaffected by the light.

Bottom line is that you have to learn to use the Pergear 100M to its strengths, and, if you do so wisely, you can use those light leaks to devastating effect.

We’ll start our detailed examination with a look at vignette and distortion.

There’s no major concerns here. There is a small amount of pincushion distortion (I used a -3 to correct) and a moderate amount of vignette (+44 to correct).

The Pergear 100M is not entirely immune to color fringing, though it isn’t bad. You can see a bit of blue-green fringing after the plane of focus here.

It did fairly well with text, too.

That’s important, as a lot of macro work includes shooting shiny, well lit surfaces that are likely to produce color fringing. Less color fringing means more versatility in what you can capture and in what conditions.

The lens is not free from lateral chromatic aberrations (this tends to be a weakness of cheaper optical glass), but it’s fairly well contained.

So, not a flawless performance, but not bad for an inexpensive full frame macro lens, either.

So far, so good. What about sharpness? These tests are done on the 45MP Nikon Z8 body, and crops and comparisons will be shown at 200%. Here’s the test chart:

And here are F2.8 crops from across the frame, including the center, mid-frame, and lower right corner.

Macro lenses tend to be very sharp, typically, but as we saw from the MTF charts, essentially the closer you get to your subject, the better the lens performs. At the test chart chart distance, the results are pretty ho-hum, with unexceptional contrast or rendering of fine details.

That’s true for real world results, too, which are reasonably sharp but lack the high contrast, high detail “bite” that I expect from macro lenses.

Stopping down to F4 does improve contrast somewhat, but it doesn’t radically improve sharpness.

A look at the more distant MTF diagram earlier showed that the lens is actually sharper in the mid-frame zone than it is in the center at distance, and that proved true in my tests. I found center and corner results at F5.6 (usually the aperture value that produces peak sharpness consistency across the frame) to be only okay, but the mid-frame result at F5.6 is quite sharp.

If I shift over to the upper left corner, where I have the identical bill, the results aren’t nearly as good.

If you buy this lens, you might want to remember that compose accordingly.

F8 and F11 remain fine, but you’ll see a pretty obvious amount of softening after that due to diffraction. Minimum aperture is F22. I found that the camera didn’t quite meter correctly when the aperture was set to F22, with a mild underexposure. I’ve found this to be pretty common with lenses that lack electronics.

The most important aspect of image sharpness for a macro lens is in the macro area, and the MTF suggest that performance is most consistently good at very close focus distances. It’s pretty common to select smaller apertures at macro distances because otherwise depth of field is so tiny that it’s almost unusable.

I’m somewhat spoiled by owning some very good macro lenses, so I’m not necessarily blown away by sharpness and contrast in macro images from the Pergear 100M, but they are good enough to be useful. This shot (I think at F5.6) of the gears on an adjustable wrench have enough detail to look interesting.

This shot at F2.8 shows enough detail and contrast to work when viewed large, but the fine details aren’t exquisitely well resolved when viewed at a pixel level.

I do think there is enough sharpness to satisfy those whose budgets will only cover a lens like this. Obviously you can get superior results with a superior lens (the Laowa 100mm F2.8 2X Macro is optically superior, for example), but you’ll almost always pay dearly for that superior lens.

There’s plenty of performance here to shoot the classics like the ring in the pages of a Bible, for example.

Or how about the strings on a guitar?

Bokeh is reasonably good from the Pergear 100M. You can see from the macro images above that it is very easy to produce a shallow depth of field when shooting at macro distances, which means a LOT of bokeh. I also felt like bokeh was pretty good in other circumstances, too, like the specular highlights in this shot of a classic SLR.

There’s a bit more edges than what I would like in the bokeh of this shot of dried grasses, but it doesn’t look bad.

At close (but not macro) distances, it isn’t hard to completely blur out a background.

Because of the focus challenges outside of the macro range, I didn’t love the Pergear 100M for non-macro images. I also didn’t feel like the optical performance was as good there, though you can still create some interesting images with a little patience.

The best use of the Pergear 100mm F2.8 2X Macro is doing macro with it. Put it on a tripod and have fun making creative images. It’s a great way to cope with a cold, snowy day like the one I’m experiencing while creating this review.

If you want to see more images, check out the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The Pergear 100mm F2.8 2x Macro is a bit of a mixed bag. On the build side of things, it feels fairly well made, and that’s particularly true when you consider the lost cost of the lens. It’s also fairly heavy, however, and the mechanics of the focus ring aren’t perfectly executed.

The short focus throw outside of the macro range makes this a less appealing lens to use for general purpose photography, and I liked it best as a macro lens.

The flare tendencies of the lens can be harnessed to creative use, and while the Pergear 100M is far from the sharpest macro lens that I’ve used, it’s not fatally flawed either. The fact that it has twice the level of magnification as many other macro lenses that can just go to 1:1 means that there are even more possibilities of images you can make. I was able to create a lot of images that I enjoyed with it, and it that is true for someone like myself who has used and reviewed many hundreds of lenses (and dozens of macro lenses), then I suspect you’ll be able to thoroughly enjoy your macro experience with the Pergear 100mm F2.8 2x Macro, which qualifies as one of the best full frame macro bargains out there.

Pros:

• Good level of build quality
• Very inexpensive
• Low distortion
• Low vignette
• Minimal fringing
• Reasonably sharp at F2.8
• 2x magnification
• Strongest performance is at macro distances
• Bokeh quality pretty good
• Some will find flare artifacts and light leaks artistic
• Very decent full frame macro lens for a budget price

Cons:

• No electronics
• Focus ring weight is too heavy
• Not enough focus throw
• Somewhat flare prone
• Mediocre results at distance

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Pergear 100mm 2x Macro @ Pergear | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Purchase the Nikon Z8 @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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