7artisans 28mm f1.4 Review: Wide and Bright
By: Aloysius Chow
Tags: Review, Photography, Gear, Technology, Lenses

In the box, you’ll find a rubber focus tab attachment, an information leaflet, a focus calibration chart, and of course, the lens. You’ll be in for a shock when you first lift this lens out of its foam cradle. It’s remarkably dense, weighing in at 488 grams. In combination with its length of 70mm (excluding the mount), it turns out to be rather front-heavy for an M-mount lens. Those who prefer more compact and lightweight lenses might want to look at the 28mm Summicron or the 28mm f2 Ultron instead.

Leica-esque distance markings adorn the focus ring, which spins very smoothly: this is one of the nicer focusing helicoids I’ve used. There are depth of field markings placed close to the mount, but they’re quite densely packed, making them a little hard to read. These markings are etched prior to painting, so I wouldn’t worry about them wearing off anytime soon.

The aperture ring clicks at single stops (even f11, although the marking is absent from the ring), and rotates smoothly throughout its range. However, do note that the distance between stops does not remain constant, unlike some other M-Mount lenses from Voigtlander and Leica.

Mounted on the M10. My Canon 50mm f1.4 LTM is to blame for the starry bokeh.

Now, let’s see how it handles when mounted to a body.

As alluded to earlier, it does feel a little front-heavy when mounted to the M10 I tested this on. It’s manageable though.

Something that might be a little more problematic is the viewfinder blockage. The lens extends pretty far into the M10 rangefinder’s field of view. It obstructs a fair amount of the frame, enough to get in the way of composing your shot in some situations.

Asides from the weight and viewfinder blockage, I don’t have anything negative to say about this lens’s build. It’s solid, well-built and the focus and aperture rings work nicely. No complaints from me.

Sharpness

Shot on the Fujifilm X-E3

This lens isn’t quite like the 35mm f1.2 I last reviewed, which was built with specific optical compromises in mind to achieve unique rendering. Rather, 7artisans took a more modern approach with this lens.

In my experiences on both the X-E3 and M10, central performance is excellent even from f1.4. The corners are a tad soft wide open, but they sharpen up nicely as you stop down and are fully usable from f2.8 onwards. I won’t be including test results here: the folks over at phillipreeve.net do a better job of that anyway, and they conducted comprehensive tests of the FE-Plus version over on their site. Suffice it to say, this lens has resolution that is on par with most modern lenses.

Note that the corners are likely to perform differently when the lens is adapted to any mirrorless body, thanks to field curvature and corner smearing issues. 7artisans has just released a FE-Plus version meant to deal with the thick filter stack issues on mirrorless cameras: more on that later.

Bokeh

The 13 aperture blades in all their glory.

Wide angle primes in the 24–35mm range often struggle with midzone transitions, in the form of unpleasant outlining of structures. The below shot was taken with the subject around 2–3 metres away: