Meike 35mm f1.7 lens review

Performance beyond its price

Meike are a Chinese company that are pumping out cheap manual focus primes for mirror less systems.
I am currently unsure if they design and manufacture their own lenses or just rebrand third party OEM lenses, I say this because i have seen company’s such as Neweer selling identical lenses under their own brand.

The Meike 35mm f1.7 lens is available for a selection of crop mirror less camera mounts, i purchased my sample for Fujifilm’s X mount for a sum of £70.
Meike also sell an f1.4 35mm variant which costs about 50% more than this f1.7 version which i may buy in the future for a comparison.

Starting with a physical overview, the body of the lens and the lens mount are fully metal with no plastics in sight. This gives a great first impression when initially removed from the packaging. Sadly though no lens hood is provided in the box and so a generic hood will need to be purchased that can mount to the filter threads.

The aperture ring is click less and both it and the focus ring initially seemed reasonably well built with a smooth motion and a fairly light but not loose resistance however after using the lens for a while some issues with its design started to become apparent.
As you can probably see in the pictures the aperture ring is almost flush with the lens mount and so when attached to the camera it is very close to the body and a bit awkward to reach and use. Whats worse despite been a bit awkward to adjust it seems a bit too easy to move by accident when manually focusing, this been due to the light resistance and click less design. If I didn’t keep an eye on it when shooting i would find it drifted as a shot.
The other issue that irked me with the aperture ring was that the distance between f8 and f22 is a matter of millimeters and so is near impossible to accurately set and replicate the desired aperture within this range.

Using the focus ring I found that I had the same issues due to its low resistance, It was very easy for me to knock focus off slightly without noticing when removing my hands from the ring between shots which i haven’t had with any other lens I have used although i could just attribute that down to myself been ham fisted.
The one other issue with the focus ring is that it does not stop at infinity focus and allows travel beyond the infinity point and when combined with how easy it is to knock the focus off i found myself a few times taking landscape images slightly beyond infinity by mistake.

For such a cheap lens the sharpness it provides is superb, wide open at the centre of the frame it is sharp to the point that in a blind test i doubt you could reliably tell it apart from more expensive lenses and even edge sharpness is good enough that i cant find fault with it.
The performance is far beyond other lenses of the same price tag, this can be seen in the sample images provided by myself and in user galleries (https://www.flickr.com/groups/meike_35mm_f17/pool/).

The lens does suffer with vignetting wide open, it is noticeable in a lot of scenes such as landscapes however you have to take into account that by f2.8 it is mostly gone and unless you shoot jpg you have the ability to fix in post. All things considered it does not cause any real issue in real world use.

Another issue that this lens can suffer with is flaring, while not ideal as with all lenses the use of a hood will fix the problem, sadly as i mentioned earlier the lens does not come with one in the box.

One of the most pleasing aspects of this lens is the quality of the bokeh balls. While not a main concern when purchasing a lens, who doesn’t love good bokeh? Especially for more fun applications than any serious work.

Overall I can say that I am happy with the £70 that i spent on this lens.
While it does have its ergonomic issues that can cause some missed shots if you aren’t careful when handling your camera, the technical performance is solid. It is a sharp lens with no glaring optical deficiencies that cripple it in any meaningful way.
All i can say is to try the lens as its up to the individual if the image quality is worth the handling deficiencies.