Over the past few years, it has become increasingly common for what I call “Boutique Third Party” brands (small lens startups) to deliver some really interesting budget lenses. Many of the early lenses were designed for the smaller APS-C sensor, but recently I’ve seen more of them tackle the more challeng [Read more...]
Boutique Third Party Brands
There are a number of small lens makers who have been developing lenses particularly for modern mirrorless cameras. Most of these (but not all) are budget, manual focus alternatives.
NiSi has historically been a company that has made filters for other people’s lenses, and a search of their products shows a lot of filters with very high reviews. But at some point they clearly decided that their optical glass expertise could just as easily go into the construction of lenses themselves, which has re [Read more...]
NiSi has historically been a company that has made filters for other people’s lenses, and a search of their products shows a lot of filters with very high reviews. But at some point they clearly decided that their optical glass expertise could just as easily go into the construction of lenses themselves, which has pr [Read more...]
Macro seems to be the new thing among the smaller, boutique brands coming out of China. The TTArtisan 40mm F2.8 1:1 Macro (which we’ll call the TTArtisan 40M for brevity) is the second such 1:1 macro lens that has come across my desk in the past month. Like all of the TTArtisan lenses to this […] [Read more...]
The past several years have seen the rise of a number of new Chinese lens makers, many of which follow a fairly typical blueprint of lens design. Metal construction, full manual focus and aperture control, and no electronics. Many of those early lenses had nice construction in terms of materials, but there were some [Read more...]
My first experience with a fisheye was actually with another TTArtisans lens, in this case the TTArtisans 11mm F2.8 Fisheye I reviewed in 2020. Fisheye lenses are unique and far from traditional, as typically we are looking for minimal distortion while the fisheye effect is really all about distortion. That does provide a [Read more...]
The TTArtisan 21mm F1.5 ASPH is the second lens I’ve reviewed from Chinese lensmaker TTArtisan. The first was an 11mm F2.8 Fisheye lens, which is hardly a conventional lens. That lens was good enough, however, that I was open to testing another TTArtisan lens. A 21mm F1.5 lens is slightly more conventiona [Read more...]
The TTArtisan 21mm F1.5 ASPH is the second lens I’ve reviewed from Chinese lensmaker TTArtisan. The first was an 11mm F2.8 Fisheye lens, which is hardly a conventional lens. That lens was good enough, however, that I was open to testing another TTArtisan lens. A 21mm F1.5 lens is slightly more conventiona [Read more...]