7artisans 55mm f1.4 review

Sharper, faster and stronger than vintage

7artisans are a Chinese brand known for making a plethora of fast budget prime lenses for crop mirrorless camera systems. I recently picked up their 55mm f1.4 lens for my Fuji x system, it set me back a total of £75 from amazon UK which makes this little lens around a fifth of the price of the Fuji 50mm f2.

Appearance and construction

First impressions are good, the lens looks and feels solid in the hand as it has a full metal body and mount. Unlike a plastic lens it has a good amount of weight to it but not so much that it is a burden, it feels nicely balanced on my X-T1.
The overall design of the body is fairly plain business as usual kind of stuff, the only thing that really stands out to me been the aperture ring that is at the top of the lens not near the mount like on first party lenses. The ring is is click less and I found myself accidentally adjusting aperture slightly with my finger tips while focusing fairly regularly.
Both of the rings feel well engineered with a good amount of resistance and no lateral play however sadly on the focusing ring the distance between min focus and infinity is only around a third of a turn making this a bit difficult to focus accurately wide open.

Upon focusing the front element moves in and out of the main body barrel and this action feels and sounds like it may be sucking in a quite a bit of air, although that could just be tight tolerances and internal elements moving against themselves but it would be interesting to know what if any dust build up is like over long term use due to this action.
The front element of the lens while large feels well protected from damage with a protruding filter thread, however it does not have a conventional mount for a lens hood or even come with one in the box. If you are wanting to add one which I would recommend to both protect the lens and reduce the lenses tendency to flare then it looks like you are stuck with using the type that screws into the filter threads.

Performance
The first things that I did with this lens before taking it out for a shooting session were a couple of side by side comparisons against other lenses. The lenses used were as follows:
Ricoh 50mm f2 (Vintage adapted to Fx): Chosen to represent a dime a dozen 50mm vintage lens that are considered good alternatives to these cheap modern Chinese lenses.
Kamlan 50mm f1.1 mk1: An alternative 50mm Chinese lens in the same price bracket.
Fujifilm 35mm F2 : My go to Fuji lens to give a an example of what a premium first party prime lens performs like in comparison.

Exposure
When looking at this f1.4 lens you may be thinking that you will gain a whole stop of exposure over any more common f2 alternative however that is only the case if a lens incurred zero or very minimal optical losses internally. Sadly that isn’t usually the case, especially with these cheaper modern lenses or vintage designs there can be a fair amount of loss within the lens due to reflections caused by inferior coatings and manufacturing standards.

When I tested the 7artisans lens i found that at f2 the light transmission was on par with the vintage Ricoh lens and the Fujifilm lens. Opening up to f1.4 we would hope for a 1 stop increase in exposure but due to internal losses we only see about a 2/3rd increase, this is only a 1/3rd stop lower than what we hoped for which isn’t all that significant but is nevertheless something to be aware of if the primary reason for buying this lens is low light performance.

Image quality

Considering the price point of this lens I can say that in ideal conditions the image quality is superb, it lacks a certain pop but the saturation is well balanced and the contrast cant be faulted.
The sharpness in the central portion of the lens is good and when pixel peeping or cropping down an image it outperforms both the vintage lens and the kamlan 50mm f1.1 from wide open by a good amount as can be seen in the comparisons below.
Moving to the edge of the frame and sharpness is also surprisingly good, the edges are not rendered perfectly as is expected but well enough that it does not noticeably detract from the image.

Under most conditions the bokeh presented is usually pleasing to the eye, it is soft and not at all busy or distracting however in my opinion it can occasionally with certain backdrops render less than acceptably as shown in the sample image of the harbour at the bottom of this page.
If you are planning on using this for printing large it is definitely sharp enough to give acceptable results but if your only using it in compressed mediums such as Instagram then sharpness is not what you should be focusing on. The main differences that you may want to focus on and may notice between it and other lenses of similar focal length are the contrast, saturation and bokeh performance.

Looking for vignetting, in a bright plain scene it is clearly present wide open but it does start to disappear as you stop down. In most scenes with busy backdrops it wont really be noticed the majority of the time and in portraits it may be desirable.

Colour fringing becomes quite obvious in harsh lighting but is not much of an issue in more softly lit scenes.

Bright light sources to the edge of the frame also show that this lens isn’t great at dealing with flare, contrast can drop significantly under these conditions so it is worth purchasing a lens hood avoid this as much as possible or simply using a hand to shade the lens.

Conclusion

Overall i would say the 7artisans 55mm f1.4 is definitely worth the money asked. Yes it has its flaws as noted but they do not negate what it offers in terms of the apparent solid build quality or the quality of the images that it can produce if you handle it correctly to work around them.

Thanks for reading