7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 - A lot of lens for a little money

Each lens in my kit of fujicrons serves a very clear function and I love each of them for that. While they are fantastic in most regards, they are somewhat lacking in character. For most intents and purposes they are all excellent. They're just the right size and weight, they’re weather sealed, they focus quickly, precisely, silently and internally and they have marvelous image quality. However, frankly they’re a bit too good for their own sake, which brings me to the point I'm trying to make. For all their qualities, of which there are many, the fujicron line-up of lenses are rather bland in their rendering. Good, some great, but nothing special. All of them are a little too well corrected, a bit too modern.

Enter the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4, decidedly a character lens. One that cost me less than 80 European Rubles. And for that little money, this is a lot of lens.

I decided this summer I would build two lens kits - one for serious work, where I need or want auto-focus, for bad weather and one for fun, for character and for when I want to feel like a hipster and focus my lenses manually so I can get a lot of blurry photos. Ehm, I mean images with soul and character.

Buying this lens was an afterthought, a what-if, because I had initially set my sights on the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.2, which turned out to be a sizable disappointment, lacking in build quality, look and feel and most importantly, also quite bad as far as the images it made, reason for which I returned it less than a week after buying it. Because I still wanted a fast, manual fifty equivalent, I then proceeded, with expectations set really low due to my experience with the 35mm f/1.2, to buy the 35mm f/1.4, simply on a whim. It was only marginally slower and about half the price of it's f/1.2 counterpart so I expected very little from it.

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Look and feel, form and function

Much to my surprise, the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 turned out to be remarkably well built, looked damn sexy and proved to work and function like a lens many times it's price.

Everything - from the shiny, gun-metal black mount, to the barrel shape and design, the engraved distance markings on the lens and the overall finish - speaks of quality and at that, a level of quality that far exceeds the price-point.

The 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 is built to exceptionally high standards, the barrel is entirely made out of metal, giving the lens a sturdy, durable feel and generally tolerances are at their minimum. The front situated aperture ring, while sadly not clicked is stiff enough so that it doesn't easily get bumped out of place and the textured surface provides adequate grip. Although that is not the case with the focus ring, which does turn smoothly, the textured finish is considerably less pronounced than that of the aperture ring and for that reason focusing proves difficult because it tends to slip if you don't grip the ring firmly enough. The focus travel is rather short, with around 100 degrees of rotation, but I found it just right and once I added a focusing tab to the focus ring, my experience manually focusing the lens improved dramatically, so much so that it is now an absolute joy to use.

Built like a 35mm, the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 gives a diagonal field of view on my Fujifilm APS-C sized sensor of 43 degrees, roughly equivalent to what you would see through a 52.5mm lens on a full frame body. The optical formula features eight elements in five groups and the manufacturer claims Japanese Hoya lenses have been used in the construction and touts great image quality and resolution, which we will soon come to see is exactly the case.

7Artians 35mm f/1.4

The aperture system is de-clicked, opens up wide to f/1.4, closes down all the way to f/16 and consists of nine, slightly rounded blades. The minimum focusing distance is 35cm, that's ever so slightly more than a foot, for the yankees out there. Weighing in at around as much as two medium-sized tomatoes, or tomatos, if you're *that* kind of fellow, so basically exactly 228 grams. Despite it's rather compact size, there is a some heft to it and it feels reassuringly dense. Filter thread size is 49mm and it comes in Sony E, Fujifilm X, M43, Canon EOS-M and Nikon Z mounts.

Image quality

Above all and most importantly, the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 makes absolutely gorgeous, beautiful images. It definitely has it's own look, not very different from the how the vintage lenses of yesteryear render. You could say a lot of things about this lens, mostly very good, some quite bad, admittedly, but there's one thing you can't say - that it makes bland images.

Surprisingly sharp in the middle wide open, it's unsurprisingly soft in the corners. However once you stop down a little it gets bitingly sharp and it's ability to capture detail and render good resolution is nothing short of remarkable. The way it renders is decidedly gentle and somewhat tame, but all this works in it's favor, making images that have an elegant air to them, a noble, timeless demeanor.

Colors are pretty and bright, but a little muted and restrained - it has a very classical look, so some added saturation in post production is necessary to liven up the tones, breathing new life into the images. Color accuracy is a bit off and tends to lean towards the cold end of the color spectrum, but that is neither here nor there, since adjusting the white balance is usually a click away in most processing software.

The 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4's minimum close focus distance of 35mm, it's maximum aperture of f/1.4 means this lens can make pretty blur wide open at practically all distances, but if you mind your placement, you can get some gorgeous bokeh, with pretty balls of light in the background and a lot of personality. Never harsh, hardly nervous or agitated, always beautiful.

As far as black and white, it's where this lens truly shines, pun entirely intended. Tones generally have full body and presence and are well represented, accurately and naturally, throughout the tonal range, with one caveat. Hold that thought. Highlights are bright and luminous, gleaming with a silvery, almost metallic sheen. Mid-tones are rich and resonant, giving images a lot of depth and character.

However it's in the shadows where this lens does something really weird. It seems to me it has a tendency to easily clip shadows, before actually going into 0-level blacks. While the human eye will be able to discern plenty of detail in the shadows, turning on the clipping warning indicator in RawTherapee will reveal a lot of shadow clipping. See this image for example.

There is, though, a sliver lining. This is merely a technical issue, because in practice, for all intents and purposes images never look bad and there's always good detail and resolution in the shadows.

Another area where the 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 fails to impress is in regards to flare control. Struck dead on by strong, harsh light the lens will flare readily and abundantly and it's not pretty. At all. It's the kind of flare that utterly ruins the image, instead of providing character and personality like many vintage lenses do when they flare. There is some ghosting, which is completely uninteresting and forgettable, hardcore veiling and frankly, massive loss of contrast. /me sighs...

Unsurprisingly there is also a fair bit of geometric distortion when you shoot wide open and I was unable to find a lens correction profile, but manual geometric correction in RawTherapee is trivial, as I suspect is the case in most other software as well. Some vignetting is also present wide open, but I don't necessarily consider that a flaw, since on the one hand I often use it creatively to point the viewer's eye towards my chosen subject and on the other hand, it's so easy to fix in post that it's practically a non-issue.

Conclusion

The 7Artisans 35mm f/1.4 has a lot more going for it rather than against it. Seeing how it costs about as much as dinner for two if you go out for anything other than burgers or kebabs, and even notwithstanding the silly low price it can be had for, in light of the overall fantastic image quality it is capable of, this lens is frankly incredible. Excellently built, with good, if not great ergonomics out of the box, looking damn sexy, like a lens many times it's price point and most importantly making beautiful images with soul and character, this lens is fantastic!