Wrangling the &Artisans 50mm f1.8 AF for L mount into submission. Or maybe just walking around shooting random stuff that appealed to me while trying f-stops between 1.8 and 8.0.

Well here we are, back over 100° Fahrenheit and we're not even out of the month of May. This week has been the wake-up call for Summer. I used to take the hot temperatures in stride. The studio A/C works fine. The home A/C works fine, and we've got a rainy day account with enough money in it to replace a faltering A/C system should that happen. But the sad and frustrating reality is that as I get older I am less able to handle long periods of time out in the high temperatures and even less inclined to do so when we factor in sub-tropical levels of humidity. 

I went out today around eleven a.m. and it was already in the 90s. I spent a couple hours walking around on the sidewalks in downtown before I got hungry, tired, too hot and ready to head home. Stands to reason since downtown is a giant heat sink with lots of reflective buildings and mostly blacktop. It's generally 7-10 degrees hotter than the readings for the city in general. Not sure I'm pining for the days in the past when we spent a lot more time roasting outside. Still, the realization that with age comes less heat adaptability is sad.

I wrote yesterday about a new lens that had just arrived at the VSL World H.Q. It's a lens I didn't really need but one I wanted to try out. I've purchased a few of the early 7Artisan manual lenses three and four years ago and, while they were okay, none were stand outs or really anything to write home about. All of the older ones were manual focus lenses with no communication whatsoever between camera and lens and all of them were based on older optical designs reimagined for the digital age. The lens that arrived yesterday seemed important to me as an example of how quickly an optical company can get "up to speed" and become more integrated into the pantheon of acceptable lens choices. 

I remember buying Sigma lenses twenty years ago or even fifteen years ago and marveling at just how bad some of them were and how sloppy their construction might be. If we didn't keep trying them out and just gave up on all products coming from Sigma we would have missed out on their fabulous Art series lenses and many contemporary lenses that, if not best in class, are certainly tough and valuable competitors in the market place. Their contemporary line of primes for L mount and E mount cameras is easily among the top tier of interchangeable lenses for current state of the art cameras.!

So, what if 7Artisans came out with a really good lens at a really good price? Would our prejudices formed by their earlier products keep us from discovering that tipping point where they went from novelty to competitor? And would we miss a bargain in the process?

When it comes to the 50mm f1.8 AF lens I thought it would be a good test to see how far the company's products had come and whether it would work well on a high resolution camera like the Leica SL2. And it's currently only $228 here in the USA so it wasn't like blowing $6K on a 50mm APO Summicron SL from Leica. In comparison the price of the 7Artisans is a rounding error in the whole game. Another nudge came when I went back and watched a few reviews from people like Christopher Frost and Dustin Abbott who were quite positive about the lens; with only a few reservations. 

There are two things that I'm not used to on the lens which I want to point out. I'm not ready to say that these two things are "cons" but I mention them because I was surprised when I started using the lens to discover them in the first place. 

First, while the lens has a dedicated aperture ring which allows manual, physical setting of the f-stop the ring does not have detents. There are no click stops. You'll have to visually confirm changes in apertures. You won't be able to operate by feel. The work around is an "A" setting just past f16 and if you are in the "A" setting the aperture can be set by one of the camera's control wheels. There is a detent  as you switch from f16 to "A" but it's quiet and very subtle. If you are too quick to make the setting you might not feel the detent at all. Today I stuck with the "A" setting and used the rear control wheel on the SL2 to control the f-stop. Just as you would with a lens that has no external aperture ring. 

The second "anti-feature" of the lens is that it is noisy when stopping down to take an exposure and part of the noise is also made by the aperture blades snapping open again for viewing. It's not offensive and it sounds a lot like lenses from the film days but it is louder than most current lenses for digital cameras and so it has to be mentioned. At first I thought it was slowing down the shutter response but I did some test shots at higher shutter speeds complete with moving subjects and the sound difference had no effect on the exposure or shutter speed. 

The lens is very nicely finished from a cosmetic perspective. It feels solid and mostly constructed of metal. The lens has a 62mm filter size and comes with a petal shaped lens hood (plastic; but that's fine). 

The lens is a bit bigger and heavier than the least expensive 50mm lenses from Canon, Sony and Nikon. The one I got is for the L mount system but it's available in Sony and Nikon mounts as well. Not sure about other mounts. 

Here's where we get to what I find interesting about the lens. It's not just another rehash of the double Gauss designs which generally have 6 or 7 elements in 5 or 6 groups. It's a more complex design. It's got Eleven elements in nine groups and some of the elements point to a very modern design with higher degrees of correction. It's got two aspherical elements, two high refraction glass elements, and an extra-low dispersion glass element. That's a completely different complement of glass types than offered by the usual "nifty-fifty." Since the lens has electronic contacts it retains Exif data transference and allows for camera-based aperture adjustment (as previously mentioned). It also supports facial and eye recognition. I tested it and while it's slower than a dedicated Leica SL lens it does capture eye focus. 

In addition to the aperture ring the lens also has a MF/AF switch on one side for quick changes between the two. It focuses down to 1.6 feet. And, finally, it has a USB-C port on the lens mount to allow updates for firmware. Of course I have haven't had to update firmware so I have no idea how hard or easy that might be, but the inclusion of the USB port is a step in the right direction.

Now on to the actual performance. I used the lens for quite a few images at f1.8 and found it to be at least as good at that wide open aperture as the Panasonic Lumix 50mm f1.8S lens which I've owned since it's launch. Both are really good lenses; especially for the prices. The Panasonic lens is frequently on sale for as low as $297, brand new. So --- not much more than the 7Artisans. The later lens is smaller but heavier and feels a bit denser. If I could only have one I'd probably go for the Panasonic at a sale price but it's close between the two and my preference in the moment might be have more to do with an initial prejudice against the 7A... as a result of having owned some of their mediocre, older, cheaper manual focus "dumb" lenses. If the 7Artisans turns out to be a great performer over time I'll adapt.

I spent most of my shooting time with the lens set to f3.5 and the manual shutter speed set to 1/640th of a second. The ISO for the day was 50. I wanted to use 1/640th of a second to take camera shake or user shake out of the equation for my first evaluations. At f3.5 the lens is a great performer. I also took a few (several?) shots at f8.0 and was happy with those images as well. 

Why my sudden interest in autofocus 50mm lenses? In spite of the fact that I have six or seven really good M and adapted Zeiss, Canon and Nikon 50mm lenses to choose from? Well, the manual lenses that get adapted to the L mount cameras need to be focused at their full aperture and then stopped down to shoot. There's no auto-stop-down mechanism. While it's easy enough to see where focus lies when using wide open apertures or large apertures, because the depth of field is shallow enough to show what is and what isn't out of focus, and while focus peaking can help, the only really perfect way to get good focus with totally manual lenses is to punch in and magnify the focus point for the finest discrimination. But all of this is time consuming. With lenses dedicated to the modern AF systems the lens is focusing at the wide open setting and stops down on triggering. All the other steps are automatic. 

Which then brings us to focusing speed. In single point focusing (S-AF) the lens and camera do fine. As good as any of the other modern lenses I have for the system. In the manual mode the focusing ring is big and well damped and features a long focus throw which means it'll take a bit of time to go from minimum to maximum focus but it will be accurate. I never use tracking focus or even C-AF so I can't speak to those use cases but I have heard from various reviewers that it's slower than Sony lenses at tracking motion; if it can track motion at all. So far that's not my concern.

One thing that's missing from the lens is a depth of field scale but if you are manually focusing the lens and are using one of the magnificent Leica SL2 cameras you can keep a light pressure on the shutter button and as you focus with the focusing ring the top display of the camera will show you the exact depth of field in three lines. The top most line is the closest distance that will be sharp for a given focus point and f-stop. The middle line shows the exact focusing distance set while the bottom line tells you the furthest distance that will be in focus. Convenient and useful. And it's here I should note that none of the $5,000+ Leica SL lenses have depth of field scales either. So you can't really pull the "deal-killer" card on the 7Artisans lens given that it's in good company. 

I like the lens for one other reason. It looks better than the mostly plastic Panasonic lens. It matches the look and feel of the Leica SL cameras better. And comparatively it is "right sized." 

All in all it's a nice product for an initial foray into AF lenses dedicated to specific systems. Would I buy it again? Yeah. The look out of it is a bit snappier than the Panasonic 50mm and it's a look I like. And the price is not scary or excessive. It's a fun lens. That about sums it up. 

It has an initial stamp of approval from the Mannequin Corps of Optical Engineers.

Click on the images to make them bigger.....

The lens is very color neutral and doesn't shift warm or cool. 

Applies to so many hobbies. Yes?

I swam this morning and then got in 3 and a half or four miles of walking before lunch.

It's not an obsession, just the discipline to stay in decent physical shape.

Being healthy makes operating cameras so much easier.

A nice balance of tones.

This is a 100% crop from the frame just below. At f2.5. As you can see, 

the lens easily resolves lots and lots of detail.

Urban decay in Austin.

I was going to cross the railroad tracks and head down the hill on the hidden path to Mañana Coffee but I got blocked by yet another train that went on for, literally, miles. About 12 full minutes from the first engines to the last car. Whatever happened to Cabooses? And what a fun word!!!

Will the younger generations understand references to cabooses in the future?

And then, mid-train, there were two more engines...

F8.0

F2.5

 Really, really nice tonality all through the frame. 

Nothing excessive and nothing too contrasty. 

All of these images are Jpegs from the SL2 camera.