Battle of the Budget Lenses
I’ve had my Mirrorless Fuji X-T3 for a year now, and I am using it more and more consistently on Zoom and Webex to teach and take classes, I have also found myself needing to make more and more videos for personal and class projects. When I got my X-T3 I was on a budget so I got budget manual prime lenses.
Opteka 35mm f1.7 — Value $80
Opteka 50mm f2 — Value $80
Kipon Iberit 75mm f2.4–Value $250
Eventually I also got a Fuji XC 35mm f2–Value $250 that my wife uses for her zoom sessions.
Overall I was pretty happy with my lenses, I mainly used them for Portaits and web meetings, so to up my video capabilities, I want to get better glass for my Fuji, and if you are going to invest in glass, you need to do your research, and down the rabbit hole we go.
Assessing the old Lenses
For their money the Opteka’s are a steel, they are built like a tank and decently sharp wide open. Not as sharp as the Fuji XC lens mind you, the imagery from that optic can cut diamonds its so sharp and the skin tones it renders are gorgeous. The Optekas by comparison are far more neutral/cool in how they render color, this of course can be brought out in Lightroom or Resolve, but it takes a little extra work.
Kipon Ibelux
The Kipon is in its own right is a beautiful portait lens with good rendition in the skin tones, the opteka lenses are cold by comparison, so the skin tones are very neutral and require color processing to make them pop. My main complaints about the Kipon are three fold: first, f-2.4 wide open is a bummer. I want faster lenses with big, bountiful, balls of silky smooth, in your face bokeh. Aesthetics aside I film in doors on a camera with an APSC sensor, to get good subject to background separation in tight spaces the wider apertures are essential.
Second, the Kipon can’t focus to infinity. I tried to grab some photos during the convergence and the planets were fuzzy, the lens focus stops just short of infinity despite the markings on the barrel. Lastly the Kipon has only 6 aperture blades so stop down even to f2.8 and that round bokeh turns into stop signs.
My priorities for new glass
For my new lens collection I had a few goals.
1) Price range, no more than $600 per lens. 2) Must work as a set, I want to do 2 camera shoots so the lenses need to match each other. 3) skin tones need to render well. If people don’t look good in front of the camera then what is the point. 4) bokeh needs to be pleasing smooth, and round, with little to no onion or cats eye, even when not wide open. 5) Fast glass, sub f2. 6) Sharp glass. 7) prefferably with auto focus. (But I eventually dropped that requirement when I decided to also get a slider.) With my criteria set I scoured B&H.com looking to see what was available in the Fuji mount.
What follows was my decision making paradigm, to be clear, while selecting cameras and glass is extremely personal, no lens is perfect, and good, sharp, fast, cheap optics are plentiful these days,if you love any particular lens brand that I rejected, but works for you, then I tip my hat to you, this is simply how I made my choice.
Fuji vs Viltrox
When I started looking for lenses, I started with the auto focus glass first. For the fuji mount there are really only 2 brands worth considering in my price range, Viltrox, and Fuji. When it comes to a battle between those two, I looked extensively online at comparisons, and when it comes to sharpness, skin tone rendition, aberration, bokeh, Kona smearing… the Fuji wins the war hands down. Now Fuji glass is the standard to beat on the Fuji mount, their lenses are sexy from construction to image quality! My main problem with the Fuji lenses are as follows. 1) They are expensive yet still have chromatic aberration issues. 2) Their sub f2 lenses have auto focus noise/speed issues. 3) Most of their glass only has 7 aperture blades, so the moment you stop down, your bokeh turns to stop signs. The XF 50mm f2 lens has rounder bokeh at f2 the the 50mm f1 lens when set to f2, that’s a serious problem for a lens that costs $1500. 4) and the bokeh has a lot of onion rings even on some of their best glass.
Auto focus vs Fuji vs Sigma
The reality is, even though I love the Fuji camera, they seriously lag behind Canon and Sony on Auto focus, face tracking, and ISO Sensitivity. When it comes to auto focus, if I am going to drop some cash on glass, what I really want are Sigma Art primes. I know Sigma will eventually come out with some lenses for Fuji this year, but I don’t want to wait, and to be honest it seems like Sigma is leaning towards releasing their contemporary line out first for Fuji, if I’m going to invest in Sigma glass, I want the Art line, so I am willing to wait for it. By this point in my research I had also decided I wanted to get a slider for my B-Camera, weighing Fuji’s auto focus limitations, with operating a slider, I opted to get a follow focus system, and prioritize lenses with long focus throws, and gears. So this really obsoleted any further consideration for AF lenses. :(
Out went the Fuji lenses and Viltrox from consideration. What ever lenses I was going to get now were going to be manual. And ideally a cinema prime.
Considering Manual lenses
When it came to Manual lenses, four brands jumped out. Rokinon, Lensbaby Velvet, Meike, and SLR Magic.
Rokinon
Rokinon/Samyang were my first consideration. They had fast lenses, and they had a full set. However Rokinon is a brand I am wary of, I know they make sharp glass, and their aberration is sleightly cleaner than Fuji for less money. My main problem is I’ve been burned by some of their first video prime lenses being unusably soft wide open back in 2015/2016ish. I dug into the reviews of their stills primes and found another very serious complaint about them which was sub 130 degree focus throws. If I’m going to be pulling focus on glass with razor thin depth of field I need focus throws of at least 150 degrees or more. The cinema primes have about 200 degrees of rotation on a focus pull which is far better. But their lenses are all different sizes, so swapping out glass on a follow focus was going to be a pain. The last knock was that Rokinon’s have only about 9 aperture blades, while far from bad, its nothing special either. I want glass that has character to it. So Rokinon was not ruled out, but I wanted to see what else was out there.
Lensbaby Velvet
My desire for a Lens with character led me to the next brand, Lensbaby Velvet and they had a lot of interesting things going for them. Most of their glass was reasonably fast, and all their lenses were macro capable which was a very attractive proposition. And with about 12 aperture bladed they could render beautifully soft bokeh. The problem was that when focusing the entire barrel of the lens extended as you turned it. This would make using any external follow focus gear system extremely problematic. And even though they are fast lenses I want a lens that is usable wide open. The glow effect that Lensbaby velvets have at wide open is excessively strong, almost at the expense of sharpness. Combine that with their cost and I couldn’t justify it. So Lensbaby was ruled out, they may be worth getting one as a specialty lens down the line, but not as a set. So far it was 1) Rokinon over 2) Lensbaby Velvet.
Meike Cinema Primes
Now the Meike cinema primes, were a tempting option. They had a full lineup at a very appealing price point. Cheaper than Rokinon with most people preffering Meike over Rokinon. They had a 300 degree focus throw which was good, and most of their apertures had 11 blades which was very good. They were also usable wide open, with decent aberration control, and smooth bokeh rendition, even better than Rokinon. They were all roughly the same size with small differences, so lens swaps should be fast in theory. But my main problem with them was that they were not faster than T2. Bokeh would be tiny compared to the others wide open, however the bokeh was smooth, and would remain smooth even stopped down, better than the Rokinons. Also reviews showed that the 35mm was optically the worst performer of the set, and that was the focal length I used the most. Rankings were now set as 1) Meike, 2) Rokinon, 3) Lensbaby Velvet
SLR Magic
So with that, the lenses that I went with ended up being SLR magic. What attracted me to these lenses was that they were faster than T2 as fast as the Rokinon, and while not the sharpest lenses I’ve researched, most reports were that that they were reasonably sharp wide open. Since I am mainly photographing my self or my wife, soul scratching sharpness is less of a need for portraiture. What made SLR Magic extra attractive was that all their lenses in the micro prime lineup were the same size, making lens swaps faster bypassing any need to tweak the follow focus gears, like I would have needed to with Rokinon. And with a 150 degree focus throw while not being the best it was at the bottom range of acceptable. Wide open the lenses had a character reminiscent of the lensbaby velvet lineup but nowhere near as strong, Lastly their apertures were all 13 blades so the bokeh would look the best out of any of the lenses thus far considered.
Before making my purchase, I put together pro/con list for all the major focal lengths that I was considering. Here is what that pro con list looked like.
To be clear, no lens is perfect. So when selecting a set of primes to pick up, you have to pick which compromises are acceptable. Since I am a visual person, color tagging what I thought was good/ok/ and ugly helped illustrate how I felt about each lens. It helped me narrow down to what I thought were the top performers and quantify what I was feeling qualitatively.
Green highlights meant I thought it performed well, Yellow highlights meant I thought it was ok/acceptable. Red Highlights meant it was a problem.
Which primes to get?
When it came to choosing lenses, I knew I wanted to get about 3, but which three to get? Out of my existing lenses I use the 50mm lens the least, but not because I didn’t like it. When testing the 50mm lens I found that it did not look as good on me as the 75mm did, so whenever it came to be a choice between the 50mm or the 75mm if the space I was photographing in could accommodated it, I would always go for the 75mm. And while the 50mm lens looked better than the 35mm lens the main problem was that for the type of videos that I do, and the environments that I have to film in, the quarters are too tight to use the 50mm lens all that often. So the 50mm existed in this nomansland of: needing it only if I was in a space that couldn’t accommodate the 75mm, but not too small of a room or I would be forced to use the 35mm. So out of the considerations the 50mm lens was out. I knew I wanted a 75mm lens. And I also knew I wanted a 35mm lens because that was the lens I used the most. For picking a third lens I ultimately decided I wanted to try something a little wider than the 35mm to make my life filming indoors on a slider a little easier, so I decided that the 25mm in the micro prime line.
Test, test, test
All lenses have compromises, so when the SLR magic lenses arrived I put them through extensive testing, to compare them against my older lenses. Here are the results. Most of these are frame grabs from OBS, with LUT filters applied. When I compare any lens to another its under the same LUT/color process for both.
The optica lenses unsurprisingly had a much colder rendition on the skin tone compared to the SLR magic lens. The skin tones on the SLR magics effortlessly look much better, and therefore require significantly less color grading to getting a pleasing result out of, yay, so far so good.
The Kipon lens compares much more favorably to its counterpart in the SLR magic lineup. Both have a gorgeous rendition of human skin tones. And while the SLR magic easily wins the Bokeh battle, the Kipon lens at f2.4 is effortlessly sharper then the SLR magic lens at T4.
What was most interesting however is that I noticed when testing how I looked on the 75mm wide open versus at T4, I noticed that wide open my face was much more rounded out by the narrow depth of field. At T4 the expanded depth of field has the effect of making my nose and ears optecally appear closer together and therefore squaring off my jawline. This was an interesting result that I was not aware of that happens when you change your F stop on how the face renders.
Encountering a problem
Things were not always great though. When initially taking sample pictures I was reasonably pleased with the skin tone rendition, these lenses can definitely render a pleasing image. But as I was taking pictures and swapping the lenses out, I notice that my exposures were not coming out consistently, even though the lenses were all set to the same T-stop and the camera internal settings never changed. So something weird was going on inside, thus I decided to do some exposure testing to see what’s going on.
What I did was light up a plain white wall, and aimed my camera at the wall, and set my camera to center weighted metering. I then neutralized the exposure starting at T-16 by using my shutter, and work my way stop by stop taking note of what shutter speed I needed at each whole stop to achieve a neutral exposure. I did this for every lens I owned on every marked stop. And I set my Fuji as the standard that all other lenses were measured off of as it was the most consistent and it’s aperture was digitally controlled. What I found was staggering.
The 75mm and 35mm lenses from SLR magic were largely fine and they matched each other for the most part the 75mm is a little darker by about 1/3 of a stop at T2 but other than that they largely match each other where they should. For the 75mm vs 35mm it was curious, that the 75mm at T1.5 being almost a full stop more open than T2: the 75mm At T1.5 was only1/3rd of a stop brighter then the 35mm at T2, and for the 35mm at T1.3 it was only 2/3 of a stop brighter then it’s T2 setting, even though T1.3 is more than one stop brighter than T2. Thus it seems that for the 75mm and 35mm at their wide open settings appear to not be as bright as advertised. For the 75mm T1.7 feels more accurate than T1.5. And for the 35mm at T1.3… T1.5 feels more correct.
These are T-stops right?
The big problem however was the 25mm, outside of wide open the lens got abnormally dark very quickly. T2 through T4 was almost a full stop darker than any of the other lenses in the SLR lineup T5.6 and T8 were barely off, but considering that these lenses are rated in T-stops and that they come with cards saying that they passed quality control inspection is beyond disconcerting and dissapointing.
Are we in the Matrix, the 25mm is.
The other problem with the 25 millimeter was also that it has a stronger bias towards green colors then the other two lenses. While the 75mm and the 35mm for the most part match each other in color, the 25mm is its darker greener, cousin. And it’s noticeably softer than the others wide open. After double checking and triple checking my exposure tests I opted to send the 25mm back citing it as being defective and ordering a replacement.
Testing the replacement 25mm
Which brings everything up to today, the replacement 25mm lens has arrived, and I have just completed a new round of testing on the exposure.
25mm, still off but closer.
The good news is even though there are some minor fluctuations in the exposure, this 25mm is never more than 1/3 of the stop darker then it’s siblings. T2, and T2.8 are the furthest off. With T4 and T8 being just barely off, shifting the aperture ring just sleightly off the t-stop mark (but still touching) sets the lens in line with the others. That being said there are still inconsistencies in the exposure. And while I would be the first to scrutinize the fault in my testing versus SLR magic’s quality control process, the fact that when I tested the Fuji lens along with the others the Fuji lens comes out perfectly every single time leads me to believe that at this price point SLR Magic cut some corners when it comes to quality controlling their lenses.
Deciding what to do.
There is no way to sugar coat that I am dissapointed, I would be far more willing to forgive the Lenses if they were labeled as F-stops instead of T-stops. If this was Pro equipment that I intend to make money with, I would definately send them back and look at something in a higher price bracket Probably Irix, Zeen, or Sigma Cine primes and get adapters. But this is for personal use, and even though I got the lenses on sale, they are still stretching my budget. The main deliberation is could I expect better from Rokinon or Meike. I’ve looked at a lot of lens tests with other cinema primes in my price range, and even they have color shifts from lens to lens. The color shift in the 25mm is noticable, but is it bad aesthetically? Not really, it still has a nice skin rendition to my eye. And it is not hard to correct in resolve.
That being said aesthetics matter. And all lenses have compromises, especially when you go for budget glass. I am very happy with how the lenses render color/skin tones, the flares and halation are nice and gentle, color, and bokeh are beautiful, so I do plan to keep them quirks and all. After all the review footage I’ve seen, the SLR Magics appear to render color better than Rokinon and Meike. But I didn’t to a stright imperical test. I could have rented them for a day and go to town on side by side comparisons. But my time is limited. You you have the time and budget, go for it!
For anyone who is interested in buying SLR magic lenses I recommend you only buy them, new, and from a store with a robust return policy. And try to get more than one, it takes 2 to find the inconsistencies, and test them when they arrive to make sure that you are getting a quality product. These lenses have quirks no doubt but considering you can pick up one for about $500, and a standard cinema prime will cost you $2500 some concessions are necessary. If the faster aperture wasn’t so important to me I would have returned the lenses and opted for Meike. I will however do what any internet user should do, leave savage but fair review of the lenses on the B&H online store, then get to work making videos.
Hope this helped someone.
David
