Photographers and videographers new to the camera world with a smaller budget may notice that buying new lenses isn’t cheap. The lens that came with the camera may not be suitable for the things that you want to capture, or you may want a lens with a larger aperture to get that depth of field or helping your camera with low light situations.

That’s when I stumbled across the 7artisans 25mm with a f stop of 1.8 for $57. It’s an Asian manufacturer that offer lenses for any camera mount, and I have to say, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with its capabilities.

Features

The 7artisans is a manual focus lens which makes this a great lens to practice manual focusing with. Not only that but manual focusing can help you get smooth focusing transitions. Even when I try the manual focus function on my automatic focus lens, it’s not easy to make a smooth transition as you have to slide quick for transition, when sliding the ring slowly it will adjust the focus by mini bits.
The 7artisans is also a very small lens which makes it very light and portable.
This lens does not feature in-lens stabilization and thus means that you’ll have to apply stabilization in post in order to get smooth footage when filming hand-held.

Testing The Lens

Now for the testing, we will be using a GH4 with real world examples. I will not be using test papers made for testing lenses as we all know that at this price range it would obviously loose against others. So let’s see how this lens does while doing your every-day thing.

In order to test the lens, we will need a comparable lens. We will be using the Panasonic 14-140mm and set the lens at as I don’t own a second 25mm.

For our first test we will be taking test pictures using a bookshelf so we will be able to look at the details written on the book cover as well as the colors of the books and the lines of the shelf.

Right of the bat it’s very easy to see that this lens has some issues in the corners. While the pana lens is sharp over the whole picture, the 7artisans 25mm is a little blurred at the edges and has some warping going on.

If you look at the text of the books, it certainly is a lot less readable with the 7artisans 25mm lens compared to the panasonic lens. It does also seem to loose some contrast in this particular test.

But when checking the center of the 7artisans lens the sharpness is great! I might even prefer the 7artisans center sharpness compared to the Panasonic one.

Our next example will be outside.

As you can see, when not doing studio photography the lens gives great results. When comparing the lens side-by-side you may notice that the 7artisans lens has that warping and blurred corners but that doesn't seem to matter too much.

This lens also gives some spectacular results when filming, the depth of field of this lens is gorgeous. If you want to see for yourself, watch our video review below:

Conclusion

So if you have money to spare, then it’s certainly more interesting to buy a premium lens, but if you’re on a budget, or still practicing then the 25mm 7artisans lens is certainly worth its money. While not suitable for studio photography, the lens will do great in many other situations which completely exceeds its price tag.