7artisans25mm F1.8 Manual Focus Lens for Sony Emount Cameras Like A7 A7II A7R A7RII A7S A7SII A6500 A6300 A6000 A5100 A5000 EX-3 NEX-3N NEX-3R NEX-F3K NEX-5 NEX-5N - Black

I purchased this lens as a low cost, lightweight lens for my Sony a6000 and it generally delivers.The good bits: The lens feels well constructed and the 25mm is a good focal length on AP-C for general, "walkabout" photography. As a simple prime, it should deliver sharp images which is appears to do especially at the image centre and wider than f2.2. Colour rendering is OK and as a manual focus lens, the focus accuracy is in the hands of the photographer.So, here are the minor issues:1. The focus ring doesn't have much throw, i.e. small inputs result in significant focal point changes and so a steady hand is needed.2. I'm not sure whether it's me but I find manually accurately focusing a wide lens (equiv. 37.5mm) via an EVF tricky. Using focus peaking requires a lot of concentration for subjects beyond 10metres and so the only way (for me) is to use the a6000 focus zoom function.3. The aperture ring is de-clicked presumably for video work. I find this an irritation as it's easy to inadvertently move it to another setting.4. Other reviewers have cited poor accuracy around aperture settings - I've not had chance to check this out yet but from initial tests and comparisons, it appears to be OK.In summary, it's useable and produces good images but you need to spend time and effort on focusing.

Bought on a whin to use primarily on a lovely "old" Sony NEX-7 I just acquired at a bargain price; the NEX-7 has pretty abysmal AF performance by today's standards but is smaller, lighter, and its controls are arguably better suited for use with manual lenses than more recent Sony cameras like the A6500 I normally use. It also has a 24MP sensor so shows up any lens shortcomings all too well.The 7artisans 25/1.8 has a few mixed reviews around the web, all agreeing it is sharp in the central region with awful corners. Some criticise its build quality, others not. Most mention strong light fall-off (vignetting) at wide apertures and some barrel distortion. A few mention its lack of CA... which attracted my attention; lateral CA is simple to correct in software but longitudinal CS (aka "bokeh" CA) not so much. The latter produces overall purple/green colour shifts either side of the plane of focus and/or "purple fringing" on high-contrast edges. These effects are quite hard to correct and I dislike lenses that produce them, no matter how good they may be in other respects.So, how how is this lens? It's pretty good :-)First: no CA. Zilch. Perfect. Secondly it's actually very sharp at all apertures - not just "sharp enough" but really sharp. The edges are ok too, but the extreme corners are not so good, just as expected, with significant light fall-off. The distortion is nothing like as bad as I was expecting and doesn't even need correcting in most cases IMO, but correcting it does have other positive side effects as it tends to crop out the extreme corners. But the story doesn't end there; the lens' performance in terms of vignetting and corner resolution improve dramatically as you stop down, and even the already sharp centre part improves noticeably by f/2.8. The sweet spot appears to be around f/5.6 or f/8 where the lens is sharp across (almost) the whole frame and fall-off is negligible. Colour and overall rendering is first class,with oodles of low-contrast detail and "bite" ("micro-contrast"), none of the dull, flat look of most modern consumer-grade lenses that cost far more.Optically this is an impressive performance for a cheap lens and probably better than you get even from most adapted legacy lenses, but in a tiny package designed to fit the camera. Unfortunately this design is not without its flaws; the focus and aperture rings are narrow and quite close together and I often find myself inadvertently trying to focus with the aperture ring - had the aperture ring had click stops this wouldn't happen, but unfortunately it is click less :-(The focus ring itself is quite smooth in action and without backlash but the throw is only about 120 degrees end to end which doesn't sound too bad - until you realise this lens has a very close minimum focus and the "normal" range of about 1m to infinity only takes about 30 degrees rotation. This makes focus adjustment somewhat over-sensitive with tiny movements resulting in quite large changes of focus, not helped by having no well-defined hard infinity stop. When you remember that a similar-sized rangefinder lens may use 240 degrees of rotation to cover the same range - eight times the rotation. There's a neat little stick-on focus tab in the box which is a nice touch and may help some users but I've never been a fan of focus tabs, preferring to focus with thumb and forefinger on small lenses.Overall it's by far the best of its type I've tried - and probably the only one I'll end up keeping. Recommended.

Used on my sony a6000. Really is a joy to use, produces some lovely photos but does sometimes leave a slight vignette effect.

It's okay. I bought it to use with my Sony a6000. I found that in certain light (though light this lens should be able to handle) that some parts of the photo pixelates.

Great lens would recommend it realy is very good quality and nice images produced