Lens First Impressions: 7Artisans Photoelectric 50mm f/1.8 AF; Again… Far Better Than It Has Any Business Being.
Spoiler alert… again. Let me get the one weak spot out of the way.
Kind of big.
That is it. Everything else?
Pretty great.
I am a bit stunned by this lens, as I was with the TTArtisan AF 75mm f/2. But for slightly different reasons. I am less stunned that this lens exists and more surprised that:
- It took this long to be made.
- It was made by 7Artisans.
What am I on about with the first bullet. Well, a large theme that has run through this blog has been my seemingly endless search for a proper normal prime for full frame Sony. I will not talk through every lens in detail but to make my point I will list every attempt. To keep this list manageable I will ignore all manual focus glass.
I left off the precious. That is a wonderful piece of glass, and comparing it to mortal lenses is unfair.
That is a lot of lenses. Again, if I had included adapted and native manual focus glass, the list would have gone on for much longer. None bad. Also none of them resonated with me in the end. I have asked myself why numerous times. All I can come up with is they all committed one or more of the following crimes:
- Too plasticky.
- Too light.
- Slow stills AF.
- Noisy AF.
- Unusable video AF.
- Too expensive.
- Meh IQ.
So the second bullet. Made by 7Artisans. I have had good experiences with 7Artisans lenses before but this lens is on a different level. All prior lens offerings were manual focus. This is a first full frame AF lens. Which is surprising honestly. Perhaps their experience crafting vintage themed manual lenses allowed them to approach AF lenses differently? I am unsure how exactly they got here but I am glad they did. My take so far (Adapted from that TTArtisan AF 75mm f/2 post.):
- Premium look and feel.
- All metal build.
- A good looking piece of kit.
- Aperture ring.
- Very nice touch.
Small size.- It is a bit of a bus for its spec, but more on that later.
- Good AF performance.
- Not as fast as the best native lenses, but a match for most of the very good third-party lenses I have used.
- Great IQ.
- I really like the way this lens renders a scene.
- Little to no aberrations I can see.
- Minimal pincushion distortion that would be easy to fix in post if I did see it.
- Same goes for vignetting.
- Sharp.
- Good wide open, even better slightly stopped down.
- Very nice bokeh.
- A nice creamy background.
$199$228 or less.- The biggest surprise.
For comparison’s sake let us look at a full frame normal Sony mount AF lens that came the closest to what I was looking for, the Rokinon/Samyang 45mm f/1.8.
I liked that lens.
As I stated in a recent post…
…I have considered purchasing Rokinon/Samyang lenses again. But unlike the 75mm f/1.8 I found it easy not to go back to the 45mm f/1.8 again. Main reasons:
- Small and light also means cheap and plasticky in the case of this lens.
- Ok colors, sometimes great.
- Ok AF.
A definite personal preference scenario. I could see how someone could get on fine with it.
Then in walks 7Artisans with the AF 50mm f/1.8 that was just what I was looking for. A perfect form factor, aesthetic, and operational match for the A7C series.
So for less money than the Rokinon/Samyang I get:
- Better build.
- An aperture ring.
- Comparable IQ.
- An included on lens mount USB-C port instead of requiring me to spend more money on a dedicated adapter like Rokinon/Samyang did.
My intention is not to pick on Rokinon/Samyang here. Up to this point they were the best deal in town. Other options above also have better build (None all metal and with an aperture ring.) but cost far more. And for Sony mount there are no shortage of even more options. I do not have the time or space to address every option so I will just say I have my reasons for not being interested in those unnamed lenses also. But…
This is not a this lens is better than that lens discussion.
This is more of a 7Artisans bringing things together in one lens that no one else did for Sony. Even Sony.
- All metal build.
- Aperture ring.
- Solid stills AF.
- Solid video AF.
- Quiet AF.
- Great colors.
- Sharp.
- Solid bokeh.
- A good looking thing.
- Surprisingly low price.
- A technically proficient IQ performance with a bit of that nostalgic best-of-vintage nifty-fifty lens aesthetic.
Bringing a manual focus vintage lens build and aesthetic to modern AF mounts at a lower price than anything on the market. Nice.
And this is one of their first full frame AF lenses. Their first was an 85mm f/1.8 that lost out to the TTArtisan 75mm f/2 for my purposes. I am curious to see if either creates a wide fast prime along the same vein.
Welp. First 24 hours with the lens. Images. Took some. Like to see them? Here they go.
For starters out of the box, I used it for some quick product shots.
Now off to my usual test site.
And I arrive.
And we depart once again.
Thoughts.
First off let me address my one demerit at the opening. The lenses size. The one reason I gave for not jumping on this lens immediately when it first came out…
I do not care that it is large.
Out of the box it did not bother me. Then it did everything else so well that I was completely fine with it. While I am very happy with the results above what cannot be seen in those photos is how easy it was to capture these images.
Focus was confident. It did well in low light also. And then in the few settings where the subject would not be obvious, like the herron pic above, I hit the MF switch and quickly grabbed focus. I will say that the manual focus effort was greater than I expected it actually helped with critical focus. Video focus was silent and accurate also.
I have seen and heard mention of the AF/MF switch being easy to move. This is true. But not enough to have been a problem from what I see. Over the whole day of carrying it about and not being especially gentle with it I think it switched to MF once. And when it did I realized it immediately and switch it back.
Also while on the large side for a 50mm lens it is not that heavy. All while feeling very nice in hand.
Where I landed overall is this.
It feels like an upsized and heavier Sony ZEISS 55mm f/1.8 with the addition of an aperture ring and AF/MF switch all for a fraction of the price new or used.
That is not a bad thing and about as high of a praise that I can give a third-party lens.
How have they done this for so little of a price?
I barely touched any of these photos. Slight color tweaks, minimal contrast, and lighting adjustments. No pincushion, vignetting, or aberration adjustments at all.
It gave me such confidence that after a short while I stopped taking safety shots. This lens focused so consistently that I trusted it to get the pic. And it did not disappoint me.
This lens, like I said about the TTArtisan AF 75mm f/2, feels like a gift to photographers.
Great for those just starting out, those with tight budgets, or looking for an every day portrait lens. Great for anyone that appreciates a great piece of glass actually.
A win all around for camera gear customers.
One more closing thought. Above IQ this lens is a pleasure to use. Feels great in hand. Looks good while doing it. We can pretend it does not matter, but it does… to me anyway.
It puts me in the mind of high end gear from companies that pride themselves on aesthetics and experience. An experience that typically costs far more than $228. And if you keep a watch on it you may catch it on sale like I did for $199 on 7Artisan’s page.
AT this price point it is well worth the additional cost over other new EF AF rivals based on the reviews that I have seen. It straight up massacres the slightly more expensive Sony FE 50mm f/1.8 on near every metric. I know because I have tried several times to make peace with that lens but its build and performance are non starters for me very time. The newer Sony lenses like the 40mm f/2.5 that I once championed fall just shy of greatness. In the end I traded mine for a Tamron 20-40mm f/2.8 preferring its focal length flexibility over the smaller size. As much as I tried f/2.5 did not cut it for a prime lens. Many other lens are not built as well, perform no better, and some worse, and cost significantly more. For me it is about as close to a no brainer as it could be.
Well done 7Artisans.
Some product pics after the close.
Happy capturing.
-ELW
Eric L. Woods 
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