7artisan’s $90 18mm F5.6 Full-frame Lens

Small wide-angle lenses used to be a very desirable thing.  Back in the film days there were many esteemed photographers who loved the manual focus 20mm F4 lens.  And F4 is a lot more versatile than F5.6, but for many landscape photographers they could probably get buy with this aperture.  It might also be useful as a gimbal lens.  The lens is basically a cheap, wide-angle pancake lens that weighs only 146grams.  It’s available for the Nikon Z, Sony E, and L mount systems.  Close focus is 0.3 meters / 0.98 feet.

The real question is how does it perform optically.  Early reports indicate a sharp center, weaker edges, reasonable distortion, and significant vignetting.  This is kind of what you would expect from a small wide-angle lens.  The vignetting may or may not work for your use case.

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