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Brightin Star 28mm F2.8 M-mount Review: Novelty Objet d'Art or Legitimate Lens?
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Dec 17, 2023
Photographer Dustin Abbott shares a definitive review of the unique and tiny Brightin Star 28mm F2.8 micro-pancake for Leica M mount. | Read the Text Review: | Visit the Image Gallery: | Purchase the Brightin Star 28mm F2.8 @ Amazon https://amzn.to/41rKfWM or Amazon Canada https://amzn.to/48nRaTv Check out the DA Merch here: https://bit.ly/TWIMerch | Become a Patron: https://www.patreon.com/dustinabbott | On the Web: http://dustinabbott.net/ | Sign up for my Newsletter: http://bit.ly/1RHvUNp | Instagram: http://bit.ly/DLAinsta | Facebook: http://on.fb.me/1nuUUeH | Flickr: http://bit.ly/1UcnC0B | 500px: http://bit.ly/1Sy2Ngu Follow Craig @ https://www.instagram.com/craigstoffersen/ Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo: http://bhpho.to/1TA0Xge Adorama: https://howl.me/cjU0LKdp3LN Camera Canada: http://bit.ly/DLACameraCan Sony Canada: https://www.thesonyshop.ca/?ref=abbott Amazon: https://amzn.to/3HrY64d Amazon Canada: https://amzn.to/3qG1p18 Ebay: http://bit.ly/DustineBay Into the AM Clothing: https://bit.ly/intotheAMda and use code DUSTIN10 for 10% off Make a donation via Paypal: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/dustinTWI ============================= Table of Contents: ============================= 0:00 - Intro and Concept 02:39 - Fantom Wallets
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0:00
Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you a review of perhaps the most unique
0:15
lens that I have reviewed this year and that is the incredibly tiny Brighton Star 28mm
0:21
f2.8. This is an M mount lens. Not only is this lens incredibly small, it fits easily
0:28
down in the palm of your hand, but it is the shallowest lens that I've ever seen with
0:32
the distance from the mount to the front of the lens being less than 10mm. On top of that
0:38
while there are some comparable lenses out there for M mount, they tend to have very
0:43
small maximum apertures like f5.6, whereas this lens has not only a maximum aperture
0:48
of f2.8, it has functional image quality at f2.8 as well. So the question to be answered
0:54
today is this little micro lens, as I'm calling it, a novelty or is this a real camera lens
1:00
and is it worth $325? Well, let's find out as we dive in together. I'll give you an overview
1:06
of performance and then if you want a more detailed look at the image quality, you can
1:11
either jump ahead to that in the timestamps below or you can just stay tuned until the
1:16
end. Now as noted, this is a Leica M mount lens. The way that Brighton Stars is actually
1:22
sharing it is that they will sell it packaged with adapters to work on different more common
1:28
mounts, like Canon RF or Nikon Z, Sony E mount, even Fuji X mount. I've actually used this
1:37
utilizing the TechArt LMEA9 adapter. The interesting thing about the TechArt adapter of course
1:43
is that it does give you autofocus on Sony E mount bodies and so that makes for a slightly
1:48
unique experience. This thing is so small, however, that it's actually dwarfed by the
1:54
fairly slim TechArt adapter. But when it's popped in there, it almost just looks like
1:58
a little bit of a lens cap there in the front of the LM adapter. As already noted, the lens
2:04
easily fits in the palm of the hand. It is 51.4 millimeters in diameter. If you look
2:09
at the overall length going all the way back into what kind of goes inside the camera
2:14
it's 21.5 millimeters in diameter, but as noted, it's only 9.9 millimeters that comes
2:21
out beyond the end of the body. The lens weighs in at only 125 grams, though the reason why
2:26
it weighs even that much is this is actually a really premium construction. It's all brass
2:32
and it has this beautiful black lacquer finish, which is quite unique. That combined with
2:37
the various yellow imprinting on there, it really looks like a little bit of an art piece
2:44
Now obviously you're probably not going to have filters in there that are going to fit a lens like this, but it does come with a little 25.5 millimeter UV filter to put on
2:54
there as a protection. And so you can either keep that on there to protect the front element
2:59
or you can use this little tiny screw on metal lens cap. I should note that this is an either
3:04
or arrangement. You either have to unscrew the UV filter and then screw the cap in or
3:09
vice versa. Either way, both of these things, because they're so incredibly small, they're
3:14
going to be quite easy to lose. This front cap is basically the size of like a CR, I
3:19
think it's 2032 battery that goes into even some watches. And so it's really, really small
3:26
So you're going to want to watch out for that. It has quite a beautiful nine rounded blade
3:32
aperture iris. And as you can see here, because it's so present there, it really becomes a
3:36
part of the overall look of the lens. And again, I'm going to have a lot of fun taking
3:41
pictures of this lens because it is quite beautiful. The focus ring is handled via this
3:47
little lever towards the bottom of the lens. And it has about 55 degrees of rotation. It
3:52
moves nice and smoothly. No real issues there with the TechArt adapter. I do get some measure
3:58
of autofocus, but you do have to set focus in the right position to get that to work
4:04
properly. For me, I found with this particular lens that I kept it at about the 10 foot range
4:11
and somewhere in there allowed me to get both infinity and up close. On that note, you really
4:17
can't focus all that closely. It only focuses as closely as 70 centimeters. I could cheat
4:23
that a little bit by using the adapter, which almost acts like a bit of an extension tube
4:28
And so if I put it to its minimum focus level, and then I use the adapter, I could actually
4:32
focus within that, which made the lens frankly more useful for my kind of purposes. The aperture
4:39
ring here is just this little ring that's right here. And particularly once you put
4:44
on that UV filter, there is very little to get your finger on. There's no actual ring
4:50
This lens is too thin for anything like that. And so what you have is just more of a kind
4:55
of a beveled edge there that has some grooves on it that will allow you to get a finger
5:00
on there and to rotate it. This is the most difficult part of operation for a couple of
5:05
reasons. Number one, it's winter. You can forget operating this in gloves because it's
5:10
difficult to do with just your finger. But on top of that, it's because there's no detents
5:16
there's nothing really hardly to feel. You're very likely to be unable to do this from the
5:20
back of the camera. You're almost certainly going to have to rotate it around to where you can see this and you can select an aperture value between F2.8 and F16. This lens does
5:30
have full rangefinder coupling if you're actually using it on an M-mount camera like
5:35
it's designed for. Obviously, that was not pertinent to my particular review. But anyway
5:41
this is a lens that it's beautiful, beautiful to look at. It does handle well except for
5:46
that aperture ring is very difficult to operate. But, you know, the lens does actually work
5:52
and it is beautifully made. Now, optically, this lens has six elements in five groups
5:58
And what you will find as you begin to examine the optical performance in the MTF, MTF shows
6:03
a quite a sharp center and midframe. Midframe stays at a very high level. But you get that
6:09
out to about the APS-C image circle edge and after that and out to the edge of the full
6:15
frame image circle, there's a huge drop off. And by the way, we're going to see that definitely
6:20
happens in real life as well. Now, what's interesting is that this it's not that this
6:26
lens has any kind of a mechanical issue with not covering the full frame image circle
6:30
There is vignetting, but it's all kind of natural optical vignetting about right under
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three stops of vignette. But that's manageable and it's correctable. So it's not a mechanical
6:40
vignette and this lens not being able to cover that full frame image circle. It does have
6:45
a bit of barrel distortion. It took about a plus eight for me to correct that. Surprisingly
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abberations fringing was really well controlled, both the longitudinal style before and after
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the plane of focus and then the lateral along the edges of the frame. There really wasn't
7:00
issues with either one. So that actually surprised me. Now, while the lens in real world use
7:06
is surprisingly sharp in the center and midframe, this is a lens that really works well if you're
7:11
composing in the rule of thirds area. It's really strong in those zones. It's actually
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stronger in some cases when particularly when stopped down in my experience, my tests
7:21
actually found it to be sharper in the midframe rule of thirds area than what I did in the
7:26
center of the frame. But what you will find is that there is basically no image quality
7:30
in the corners ever even stopped down to F8. I did my test on a 61 megapixel Sony A7R Mark
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five. So, you know, diffraction starts to kick in after that. And even at F8, there
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is basically no image quality in the corners. It actually surprisingly was better at F16
7:47
even though diffraction is starting to soften the image elsewhere. The corners were probably
7:51
at their best and they're still not very good. So if you're someone that prioritizes needing
7:56
sharpness in the corners, this lens is not for you at all. But I do think the lens will
8:00
work well for those that don't actually typically need sharp corners and just need sharpness
8:04
more in the rule of thirds zones. The bokeh quality is actually quite good for such a
8:09
tiny little lens. There is some outlining, but I found that I could get fairly decent
8:13
background blur. And so that wasn't really an issue. Although if you're using it on M
8:18
mount and you don't get that advantage of being able to focus a little bit closer, you
8:22
will be limited by how much you can blur out of background by the fact that you can't focus
8:26
any closer than 70 centimeters. So you can't get much magnification of your subject. This
8:31
lens is incredibly flare prone. Obviously with this kind of design, there's not really
8:35
any room there for any kind of lens hood. And as a byproduct, I found that the lens
8:40
was susceptible to lots of different kinds of flares, but particularly to side flare
8:45
Even if the sun is not in the frame at all, even a fair ways out of the frame, if it's
8:49
directional or a light is directional, you are going to get some significant flare artifacts
8:54
as you can see here. Now color rendition, I found to be kind of a mixed bag. In some
8:59
situations, I found like color saturation was on the low side and there was maybe a
9:04
very slight magenta shift to the look of images. Shooting raw, I could obviously process
9:10
lenses to taste. And so I liked the images that I got, but that's something to bear in
9:14
mind and other situations it suited the subject. And I thought that images looked great. It
9:19
is a piece of art. If you're into photography, it is definitely a beautiful, beautiful little
9:24
piece of art, but it is a functional lens. I think that it's probably best suited for
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someone who's looking for a very low profile street photography type setup. And so maybe
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you're going to use a compact or even a range find finder style body. This lens, it's basically
9:39
like you don't even have a lens on there at all. So it makes for a very, very slim
9:43
profile and I think that it probably suits where you're not looking at having corners
9:48
really all that sharp. And as a by-product, I think that it can really work for that kind
9:53
of situation. If you're someone who really likes more quirky kind of photography gear
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and you're not really a big fan of the conventional approach to modern lenses, this may be just
10:03
the kind of lens that you're looking for. And as an added bonus, it looks very hipster
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cool when mounted on your camera. I'm Dustin Abbott. And if you look in the description
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down below, you can find linkage to my full text review and also to an image gallery
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There are buying links there. And if you want a more deep dive into the image quality, stay
10:22
tuned. We'll jump in right after this
10:33
So the Brighton Star 28 millimeter really kind of looks like a novelty. So I was interesting
10:37
to see how it actually holds up. Now you can see through the TechArt adapter, I have
10:42
set the proper focal length, but for some reason it registers as the 40 millimeter F2.8
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So looking at vignette and distortion, you can see there's definitely some pronounced vignette there and there is some barrel distortion, though it's not too severe. I corrected the
10:57
barrel distortion with a plus eight. That doesn't get me a hundred percent there, but
11:02
close enough to where I feel like it's the correct balance before it starts to create
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some inversion along the edges. And so I'm happy with that. You can see that it takes
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a pretty significant amount of vignette correction to correct for the corners. And I could probably
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edge it up even just a little bit more. So we're talking about over three stops of vignette
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in the corner. Probably not surprising considering how tiny the thing is. Now the lens does have
11:29
some longitudinal type chromatic aberration, but you can see it's not terrible. There is
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mostly a little bit of green fringing after the plane of focus, not a whole lot before
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the plane of focus. And we can see that actually here, I would say that the overall contrast
11:44
is pretty good and the detail is quite nice there. Evaluating for lateral chromatic aberrations
11:50
is a little tougher because as we're going to see, this lens does not really resolve
11:54
the corners on a full frame sensor. However, you can see that here along the edges of the
11:59
frame in this section, the black to white transitions look really nice and clean. And
12:04
so lateral chromatic aberration is not really an issue either. So of course, throwing this
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little tiny optic on a 61 megapixel sensor and then showing the results at 200% seems
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a bit unfair, but hey, we're not really about fairness around here. You can see in the middle
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of the frame that while contrast isn't off the charts, there is a decent amount of contrast
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and detail there. Mid-frame looks really quite decent, not like top notch, but definitely
12:32
better than average. And it's really only when you get towards the corners that you
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can see this lens really does not resolve the corners on a full frame sensor. It's going
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to get you about 90% of the way there, but that's not even resolution there
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So for a quick point of comparison against a recent 28 millimeter lens that I reviewed
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on this exact same camera, and that's the Viltrox 28 millimeter F1.8. Now I'm going
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to look at both lenses wide open. So this is the Viltrox at F1.8. It's actually maximum
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aperture of F2.8. It just doesn't report correctly through the adapt tech art adapter there
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In the middle of the frame, you can see, as I pointed out, that contrast is in detail
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It's not anywhere near what the Viltrox is. The Viltrox really is quite a sharp lens
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And in the middle of the frame, you can see that the Viltrox is definitely has better
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contrast in detail as well. It's when you get into the corners, of course, that it is
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night and day because the Viltrox is doing quite a good job in the corners. Whereas this
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Brighton star lens doesn't really resolve the corners. Now if we stop down to F4 on the right, we can see that it doesn't really make a radical
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difference as of yet. I do think the mid-frame contrast is improving there. And in the corners
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it's starting to take a little bit of shape, but it's still far from resolving anything
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By F5.6, you can see that resolution is trying to creep its way towards the edge. Not really
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quite there. In the middle of the frame, however, things are looking a little bit better there
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And the mid-frame is looking excellent. I would say the mid-frame, to me, looks better
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than what the center does. Let's just take a look here at other spots. Over here on the
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left side, we can see also still looking really, really fantastic. And if we go down
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into this edge here, you can see that it's definitely making an improvement as resolution
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attempts to reach there. But as we get down towards this corner, obviously nothing there
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And thus, if we look up in this corner, there's a little bit of resolution up to this point
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and then it starts to fade. And then up into the right corner, similar kind of scenario
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And so the centering seems to be quite good. It just doesn't quite cover the full-frame
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image circle. If we stop down to F8, we can see once again just a little bit more into
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that corner. Down on this side, you can see that resolution is trying to creep into the
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face a little bit. You start to see this text starting to resolve. Still a long, long way
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to go. But elsewhere, I mean, that's looking really, really fantastically sharp. And if
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we come back to the center of the frame, the center's looking quite good. Though again
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I still stand by comparatively, I would say that the mid-frame performance is better than
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the center. Now at F11, we're starting to lose a little bit of contrast due to diffraction
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but it still looks really quite good there where it's the best. And in some ways, we're
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getting our best performance into the corner thus far. Not amazing, but better. But everywhere
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else in the frame, it actually looks really, really good. Now things a little bit softer
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at F16 due to diffraction, but I just wanted to see out of interest to see into the corners
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The one place where that's an exception is that the increasing kind of resolution more
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and more being in focus allows us to see more in the corner there. So how does this play
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out in the real world? We can take a look at a few real world shots here. We can see
15:58
in the middle of the frame, resolution looks fantastic. However, if we get off to the edge
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of the frame, doesn't look so good there because of depth of field. But interestingly, we see
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that up here, it doesn't look too bad until you get right to that corner. You can see
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almost like a line where resolution stops there. And so that's definitely a factor for
16:18
this lens. One more example here. This shot I think looks really good if you accept that
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little bit there. In some cases, you may just want to crop in just a little bit and eliminate
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those corners. But in the center of the frame, that looks really, really crisp. Very, very
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good detail. And across most of it here until you get right to that edge, it looks quite
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good. Now, another thing that I noted is that colors can be a little flat from this
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lens. And so you can see here on the left side before I started to process that colors
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are quite low saturation. And on the right, I've tried to introduce some saturation back
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into there. Now, all of that is a taste related thing, but it is something that I observed
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Likewise here, I had to dial in a little extra saturation. But again, the image I think looks
17:04
pretty good. In this shot, it's low contrast and kind of low saturation, but it kind of
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worked for the setting. And so I actually really liked the overall aesthetic here and
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thought this was a great looking image. Now, natively, this lens has very, very low magnification
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You can see here that it doesn't even look like an attempt to get maximum magnification
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By the way, it looks really sharp there. That's one nice thing is you get a really flat plane
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of field if you're looking at my typical test subject, because it's occupying just
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a little bit of this. If you go over towards the corners, things not looking so hot, but
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very, very low levels of magnification. I'm able to game that a little bit by using the
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TechArt adapter, which actually allows you to kind of focus closer than what a lens natively
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will. And so as a byproduct, I was able to get in a little bit closer. Up close really
17:56
doesn't look too bad. You will see, and we're going to get to flare in just a moment. This lens does flare quite heavily. And of course there is no hood for it. And this shot here
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again, because of the TechArt adapter, I could get closer and I was quite impressed by how
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good the detail was there. But then also you can see looking at the background that the
18:17
bokeh is actually fairly nice there. There's a little, maybe a little bit more outlining
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the what I would like, but you know, some bokeh is about taste. Some people like more
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definition there. And so if you like that, then you'll maybe appreciate the lens. And
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again, subject looks pretty good there. Here's another shot that I felt like the background
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looks quite creamy really in that shot. And the detail looks really fantastic. And so
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it's lenses like this, where I feel like this tiny thing punches above its weight. Now
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again, because I was able to get extra close due to the TechArt adapter, I was able to
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you know, almost use it like an extension tube at this close. It's not a hundred percent
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in terms of the detail it's delivering, but you know, it makes for a usable image. Now
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in this, we'll start to look at our flare resistance. So in this case, the sun is actually
19:06
out of the frame. I liked the look of the image. I will say that, but you can see that
19:11
we're getting these kind of shafts coming, shafts of light coming off kind of a flare
19:16
type artifact. The image is low contrast and low saturation, but it kind of works. And
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so I like it here again, this is going to be a taste related thing, a lot going on
19:27
just catching the light coming through the window there. And so you can see it's doing
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a lot of wild and wacky things in a more conventional type shot. You can see it's, it's not quite
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so artistic, just some kind of blobs. In this case, as I stopped down a bit, we get more
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pronounced colors like that and stopping down further, that pattern becomes much more defined
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And then you can get a little bit of look at the sunburst effect. Probably the biggest
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negative that I would associate with the flare resistance is any kind of side light. Again
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because it's such a tiny, narrow little optic with a glass element right up there up front
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it is susceptible to any kind of, in this case, the sun's not even close to being in
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the frame. It's just a side light, but you can see it really has impacted the image
20:11
So if you've stuck around to the end, thank you so much for watching here today. I hope
20:15
that this has helped to answer the questions and the deep dive as to whether or not this
20:19
is a lens for you. As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in
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