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This summer Viltrox brought us a very popular pancake style lens in their 26mm f2.8 for full
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frame cameras. And now 7Artisans has essentially brought us a very similar type lens for APS-C
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cameras in their new 18mm f2 autofocus lens. Like the Viltrox it has a little aperture ring
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it's very very compact and lightweight however in this case it is much less expensive just 169 us
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dollars we already know from the response of people to other pancake lenses that this form
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factor is very popular particularly for people who are looking for a very discreet compact lens for
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street photography or for someone like myself who does less city and more out in the woods just
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having a nice walk around style lens for hiking something you could clip on to your backpack and
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and it would be very lightweight and easy to access. So we know that the form factor is appealing
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but is the lens itself worthy of your consideration? Well, I'm filming on it today
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and so you can get a sense of its rendering in these kinds of situations, and I will be doing my best to break down all of its performance as we dive through
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First of all, however, I do want to say thank you to Seven Artisans for sending me a review sample of the lens
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As always, this is a fully independent review. However, Seven Artisans has not seen the content
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has had zero input in this review, and they won't see it until you do
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All of that aside, let's dive in. Let's take a look. All right, let's take a closer look at the little 18mm F2
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which in many ways to me is essentially kind of an APS-C equivalent of the full-frame Viltrox 26mm F2.8
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This 18mm F2 has a 27mm full-frame equivalent focal length, so very similar
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Although the big difference here is that it is a lot less expensive
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It's $169, which obviously is inexpensive for those that are looking for a compact pancake-style lens
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And it is very compact. It is 64 millimeters in diameter, which, as you can see, is narrower than what the Viltrox is
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though this lens is just a little bit thicker at 27 millimeters
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so that's 2.5 inches by right over an inch deep. This weighs in just 109 grams or 4 ounces, however
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making it very lightweight, easy to throw on even the most compact APS-C cameras without having any
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issues there. It does have an aperture ring, which is clicked. There is no de-click option
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There are one-third stop detents in between the marked full positions, and then a little bit of
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resistance between F16 and automatic, though I would like there to be more. We also have a manual
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aperture ring that is fairly well damped and moves well. Build quality is decent here. It seems
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primarily to be metals. What I don't see is any kind of weather sealing gasket here, unfortunately
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Other thing that's unfortunate is rather than having a USB-C port for firmware updates on the
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mount, we instead have it here on the side and there is this little tiny rubber gasket that
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covers up that port. And so that's going to be very, very easy to lose, obviously. And then of
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course, once you have lost it, you have a potential ingress point for water in particular to get into
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the lens and affect electronics. So I don't love that design. Up front, we have a 52 millimeter
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front filter thread. However, we do have a somewhat odd lens hood here that has a rectangular opening
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here. But as you can see, it's fairly narrow at this point. And so unfortunately, at least with
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the filter. I only have one 52 millimeter filter on hand to test. It's not super thin. It definitely
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did not fit under there though. And so you would have to have a very, very thin filter for it to
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fit under that. So it seems in this case, mostly to be kind of an either or situation as far as that
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goes There are nine blades in the Aputure Iris itself Minimum focus distance is 20 centimeters and the magnification seems to be somewhere around 0 times very similar to what the Viltrox provides Overall it a compact lens and that is its primary strength
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The fact that it does have an aperture ring at such an inexpensive price makes this a nice little package
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even if we are lacking anything like weather sealing, and this is a little bit of an odd convention here
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So let's talk autofocus. Seven Artisans has equipped this lens with an SDM, or stepping-style focus motor
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and because the elements are very lightweight in a compact lens like this, you don't need a huge
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amount of thrust and fortunately this motor seems to have plenty of thrust to get the job done
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You can see the autofocus zips back and forth with good speed and alacrity and so I had no
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problem in that sense. The focus motor is quiet and I found that for general purpose, you know
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single shot type things that focus was accurate as well. What I find with lenses like this
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however, is that focus isn't nearly as good if you have a subject that is moving. You know
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if Nala is moving towards me, for example, it's much harder to get well-focused results in that
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kind of situation. But for most of the things that people are going to do with a lens like this
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not action, but just capturing everyday events, I think that autofocus is going to do just fine
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On the video side of things, you can see that the focus pulls are fairly smooth. However
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there is definitely some focus breathing here and so that does feel a little bit more kind of lurchy
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or abrupt and so unfortunately it's not a particularly cinematic lens if you want to
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make major focus changes but as you've probably picked up on these outdoor filming segments that
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I've been doing it has no problem in having stable focus when it's locked onto a subject
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and in my basic video clips I didn't have any kind of issues particularly when I was dealing with
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static subjects or subjects that were moving in a consistent fashion without any kind of great
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speed or kind of erratic behavior in terms of moving back and forth. And so for most general
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purpose video shooting, even if you're wanting to throw this on a gimbal, for example, or maybe even
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use it for vlogging, I think that for those type applications, it's going to be fine. But I don't
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think it's the most cinematic lens in terms of the quality of the focus pulls and the focus
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breathing that accompanies it that. And so maybe taking all of that into account, you can determine
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whether or not this is a lens that's going to suit your purpose when it comes to the video side of
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things. All right, let's start our optical breakdown by taking a look at the optical design
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here. We have a design of nine elements in seven groups. We can see of that two of those are extra
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low dispersion elements and then four or five of them are high refractive index elements. So that
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only leaves two normal elements as a part of the design. Our MTF chart shows a pretty steady fade
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towards the corners. The center is sharp-ish, but I'm typically accustomed to seeing lens performance
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these days typically being above that 0.8 line there, and so we're definitely starting a little
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bit softer, and as you can see by the time we hit to the mid-frame, we're already into relatively
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soft area. We get to the corners, and the corners are going to be pretty soft. We see we're averaging
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out at about a 45% level there. Now, despite being a very compact design, barrel distortion isn't too
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bad here. You can see my correction on the right, which is not perfect, but it's pretty close
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And that only required a plus five to correct for the barrel distortion. There is definitely
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some obvious vignette. You can see it's fairly concentrated in the corners and I needed a plus
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55. So roughly two stops to correct for that in the result on the right. Moving on to fringing
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and we can see that there is definitely some fringing here, particularly some green fringing after the plane of focus
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If I take a look at a three-dimensional subject here, we can see that there are definitely some green fringing
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that's showing up on some of these shiny bits and then also some around those specular highlights
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You can see just kind of jumping ahead to that that there is definitely some pretty serious outlining
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around specular highlights, some pretty strong busyness like onion-style bokeh inside. We can also see as you stop the lens down that it doing a pretty decent job of maintaining a circular shape Though as we get up here you know there a little bit of stretching that is in some of those lateral style chromatic
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aberrations definitely do exist and you can see all throughout this there's some false color on
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either side of the black and white transition lines and so this is definitely an area of weakness for
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this lens so here's a look at the test chart that we'll be getting our sharpness and contrast results
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from. I'll be shooting this on a 26 megapixel Sony APS-C sensor and looking at the results at a 200
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level of magnification. So as the MTF suggested, we can see that center detail is okay, but contrast
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is not super high. In the mid-frame, it's definitely transitioning towards looking softer there
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And if I pull down here towards the corners, we can see that the corners, they are softer
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but really relative to the rest of the frame, they're not terrible. This upper left corner to me looks a little bit rougher
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and I would say that right side generally is looking a little bit better than left side
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so maybe a very mild centering issue. Now in terms of real-world shooting at f2
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you can see here that detail and contrast aren't off the charts, but it looks really good, I would say, overall
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The result is nice and crisp there. Another shot here, and you can see, again
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And I'm perfectly satisfied with the amount of detail and contrast here in this zone
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Definitely see some of that, you know, soap bubble type effect in the bokeh and some green fringing around those
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But I don't think that it's a deal breaker as far as their performance. Now, one thing that I did notice is that if you get close or a little too close in this lens, that you get definitely less contrast
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And so towards the minimum focus distance, which is close to it here, you can see that there's not a lot of contrast
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in some of those blossoms. I moved just a little bit further back and you can see I definitely got more contrast in the results
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So going back and forth, you can see the magnification isn't as high, but definitely the level of contrast is superior
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In this shot here, we can see again that the contrast again isn't fantastic
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There's a little bit of nervousness in that transition towards defocus. But in this case, there's some of that soak bubble effect
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but it's less pronounced with a less bright background. And so overall, I mean, some people like that effect
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And so if you like that effect, maybe it will appeal to you. But that gives you a look at a kind of a broader image
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Again, here at that medium focus distance, which I think is best case scenario for this lens
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you can see that the contrast and detail looks pretty decent there
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And it's really at close focus and then infinity focus that you don't get quite as good
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Here again at, you know, closer to that medium distance, we can see that contrast and detail looks pretty good
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Definitely the soap bubble effect in this image here. and so that's either good or bad depending on your taste. Here at a closer focus distance in
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in this shot you can see that that contrast is not fantastic and so that's definitely something
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to watch for. So is there improvement if you stop down? Yes we can see from f2 to f2.8 we've
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definitely got more contrast in the image here and I would say that gives us a little bit more
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detail in the text which becomes a little more readable. It's still not what I would call fantastic
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but definitely improved. Look at the word Canada here versus here, and you can see just a lot better
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contrast. The seal is much more pronounced, looking better there. We move down towards the corner
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The corner is definitely looking better than what it did at F2, and if we look up into this corner
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it's improved. It's still not as good as the lower right corner, however. We can see further gains in
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this upper left corner from f2.8 to f4 and very slightly more from f4 to f5.6 taking a look at a
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few real world landscape images at f5.6 so if we're looking here in the center of the frame you can see
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the detail and contrast is looking fairly good so we pan down towards the corners you know in this
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case i would be happy with this image that's pretty decent detail all throughout there so
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no major problems there likewise in this image which i thought looks quite good you know good
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detail and contrast Again the lateral style chromatic aberration not looking too bad in this real world shot You know colors look good here in this image however i definitely had some disappointment so while the center looks pretty good here as we move
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off axis you can see that the edges are getting much softer and and so just not quite as much
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detail there and so a little mushy towards the corners but again the image you know at large
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looks pretty decent now as you move on to f11 diffraction will start to set in and then by f16
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which is the minimum aperture, it's going to be a little more pronounced. It's not too bad here on
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Sony. It's going to be more pronounced if you're looking at the Fujifilm 40 megapixel sensor when
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a version comes for X mount. Close-up performance, you can see that we don't have a particularly flat
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plane of focus, and so we have kind of this narrow area. Sharpness and contrast looks pretty good
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right in this zone right here, but you can see that it almost has a three-dimensional effect
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because it seems to be going out of focus, which is not really the case. It's just a matter of
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just having some field curvature here that causes that issue. Taking a closer look at bokeh, we've already looked at it in some aspects
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This image, I think, holds up pretty well. It's a little bit busy or nervous down in this zone
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but I would say that this particular transition to defocus looks pretty good
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In this shot here, I mean, again, it's a little bit further out, and so we got better contrast here
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but the problem is that leaves more in the transition zone, and so I would say that all of this stuff has much more outlining
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than what I would prefer. you know, bokeh as subjective. So I'll just let you kind of look at it. I don't love the soap bubble
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effect, but if you like it, this lens has definitely got it here with a less preferred ratio between
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the subject and then the background that looks fairly busy to my eye, too many hard edges for
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my taste, but you know, it doesn't look terrible either. Now, when it comes to flare resistance
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this lens has some issues wide open, some ghosting pattern effect. As you stop it down
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that ghosting and flare pattern becomes much more pronounced. And particularly these, where there's these really kind of color blobs
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they're not useful in my eye. You can see in this shot, even at a wider aperture
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that at certain angles you're going to get just some internal reflections
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and some issues popping around. And even here at F2, it's kind of almost like a flashing effect
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If I pan back and forth at F2, you can see that the flare pattern isn't terrible
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but if we switch over to f11 and it stopped down more, all of that becomes much more pronounced
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And so what we have here is an okay but not exceptional optical performance. There's
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definitely some flaws in this tiny lens. So what's my conclusion? There are a lot of similarities to
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the Viltrox, at least on a superficial level in terms of the basic build and kind of how the lens
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presents itself, but the Viltrox is definitely a more robust optical instrument than what the
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7 Artisans lens is. I think that in general I found that the overall sharpness and contrast was just
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okay and not exceptional and definitely as we saw in our breakdown it's somewhat situational what
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kind of performance you're going to get. Corners are never particularly sharp with this lens and it
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does have some issues with flare along the way as well and so there definitely are some optical
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limitations but at the same time I found that I could get some very nice looking images. It's a
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delightful package in terms of being so compact. And of course, it's at a very different price
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point than what the Viltrox is in that that lens is going to run you closer to 300 plus range
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whereas this one at 169 is close to 50% of the price. So I think that this is a lens that more
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people can afford. And if you're on a tight budget and you love the idea of having a little
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compact lens that has a very useful focal length, a useful maximum aperture, and can do a variety of
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things reasonably well, then the 7 Artisans AF 18mm F2 might just be interesting to you. If you
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want more information, feel free to check out the link in the description to my full text review
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which where I break things down in even greater detail there. There's also some buying links there
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As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in
