Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 - That full-frame look

I have wanted an ultra-fast fifty for as long as I've been shooting manual lenses, which is soon going to be about a decade. That's a very long time that I've drooled over several f/1.2s, only daring to dream of Canon's Dream Lens, the bizarrely shaped and absurdly priced 50mm f/0.95, while only ever owning f/1.4s at best. Now, don't get me wrong, while perhaps not "ultra" fast, a fifty 1.4 is still plenty fast, and it can make gorgeous images. I know this for a fact, as I've owned several fast fifties: a 57 and two Konica Hexanon 50s, a Nikon Nikkor, a Canon and two Pentax Ms and I loved them all.

Fast forward to today when it seems like every Chinese lens manufacturer and their mother is making f/0.95 lenses, some of them at frankly unthinkably low prices. It was not long after I stumbled upon the Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 online that I bought one for myself. The only thing I'm missing from when I used to shoot on a full-frame sensor is the bokeh and the background blur and in terms of field of view and depth of field, the 35mm f/0.95 is for all intents and purposes equivalent to a 50mm f/1.4. So of course I had to have one.

This review is also available as a video.

Adventures in online shopping

The first copy I bought had an extremely stiff focusing ring, so much so that I returned it within a couple of days. Turning the focus ring required an unnatural amount of force and that meant there was no way you could quickly rack focus in a street photography scenario.

In the beginning, I thought it was the cold, because the day I first took it out it was close to 0°C outside. Then I thought perhaps I was just used to looser focus rings and maybe it's just how this lens was made. It was like I didn't want to accept that a brand new lens, one I had waited for almost four weeks to arrive, was so badly made, so flawed. I took some convincing to eventually come to the conclusion that it was, in fact, simply defective, because even indoors, at comfortable room temperatures, the focusring was so difficult to turn, it made working with the lens a senseless exercise in frustration.

Throughout the years, having used all sorts of vintage glass and even now, in recent times, having moved on to native-mount, manual Chinese lenses, I've gotten accustomed to being quite forgiving with and understanding of some variations in build quality. Some lenses are stiffer than others. Some are loose. Some have aperture rings that bump out of place if you just stare at them hard enough. But my first copy of the Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 was something like nothing I had ever used. It was so damn stiff, it was impossible to use. So I went ahead and wrote Brightin Star, told them about the issues I was having and they agreed to a return. So, I sent it back and swiftly proceeded to purchase a second copy of the lens.

However, I began to worry the second copy of the lens would prove to have the same issue, because I had watched videos online where people either explicitly mentioned the fact that the focus ring was quite stiff or I was able to make it out from the video itself, judging by the amount of force they had to use to turn the focus ring. By now I almost kind of didn't want the lens anymore so I tried to cancel my second order, but happily enough in hindsight, it didn't take. Apparently, once you place and order on their website it's basically impossible to cancel it, even if you catch it before it even ships, which I did, but I was still unable to cancel my order. You have to just wait it out, receive the item, and then send it back. There's no canceling an order once you've paid for it.

While I did still very much want a 35mm f/0.95, I thought I'd order the 7Artisans 35mm f/0.95, and return the second Brightin Star, because these lenses seem to be practically identical brothers. So I did, I bought a 7Artisans 35mm f/0.95. That happened to be even slightly cheaper so that was nice. By now my first copy was traveling back to Brightin Star, my second copy was making its way towards me and I had already purchased a third lens, the 7Artisans, which then meant I had money in three separate 35mm f/0.95s. That should tell you how much I wanted this lens.

Eventually all things cleared up, I got my money back for my first copy, both the 7Artisans and the second Brightin Star lens had arrived by now, within days of one another and it proved to be all for the better because I was now able to compare the Brightin Star and the 7Artisans.

I ended up selling the 7Artisans on the local used market, at a slight loss, because while Brightin Star were generous enough to refund me for the first copy and pay for return shipping, 7Artisans required me to pay for return shipping. I did lose about €30 on the 7Artisans lens, but I sold it around Christmas time and that made me feel a little better about it. I think I made someone else happy.

Look and feel, form and function

My conclusion was that for all intents and purposes, they're basically identical. As far as optics and image quality I was not able to find even the slightest difference between the two. Build-wise, I think the Brightin Star is much better and I'm thrilled to have eventually gotten a really well built copy, with a focusing ring that feels and works great. It turns smoothly with just the right amount of resistance, allowing for precise and confident manual focusing. At both ends of the focus throw, the helicoid stops with muted thumps, giving the focus action a feeling of quality and great workmanship. The focus rotation is about 100 to 105° from minimum focus to infinity. The lens is extremely well built and designed. It looks classy and elegant, and works as best as I ever hoped it would.

I went online to look at it's twin brothers and this is, by far, my favorite as far as the design goes. It's really, really nice! The distance scale and aperture markings are engraved in the surface of the lens, it's not merely a paint job. While similar as far as the barrel design goes, the engravings and the markings on the Brightin Star are much more tasteful, and I think it looks a bit like a Leica Sumicron, with the orange markings for feet, the white markings for meters, even the depth of field scale is reminiscent of a Leica lens. The Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 is a quite a looker.

The focusing ring is generously wide and nicely textured. As far as design goes, it looks and feels great on my Fujifilm X-T3, it seems like it was made for the Fuji. Sure, there is some heft to it, there has to be, because there's quite a bit of glass inside. It has an optical construction consisting of eleven elements in eight groups, but it balances nicely on the camera.

Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95

There are claims online that this optical design is basically just a plain 35mm with a focal reducer at the rear, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there - just a bit of trivia perhaps, because in practice, this lens is fantastic. What I can tell you is that both from my personal testing and from stuff I've read online, this lens doesn't have a light transmission of precisely 0.95 T-stops and seems to be closer to T1.1, from what I observed. This is just an educated guess, nothing scientific about it, so please don't quote me on this, :-). Two of the lens elements are low dispersion glass which are supposed to improve light transmission and correct optical aberrations.

The aperture ring has nice, firm clicks, with a smooth, well dampened turn. It's probably one of the best feeling apertures I've had the pleasure of working with. The aperture clicks at a mix of half stops and full stops, while f/11 is completely missing. A further still peculiar thing about the aperture system is that the space between the stops is not the same for all stops, it gets smaller and smaller still the more you close down the aperture, especially once you get past f/4. I'm happy this has a clicked aperture, because the 7Artisans didn't. There is a total of twelve rounded aperture blades which makes for a very nice looking iris. Weighing in at a hefty 370g, this makes the lens rather heavy for its size, but this translates to a great feeling in hand - substantial and dense. The center of mass is close to the body of the camera so that the entire thing balances nicely and is not front heavy at all. The lens is actually quite small and compact, and comes with a 52mm filter thread.

It's available in all of the popular mounts like E for Sony, Canon EF, Canon RF, Fuji X, which is what I'm using, obviously enough. Also available for micro four thirds and Nikon Z mount. I've chosen the black variant, but it's also available in silver gray with a transparent back cap for the X mount and also in black with luminous, glow-in-the-dark painted markings, which was tempting for a while, but I think the version I got is much more tasteful. Made in China, launched in the fall of 2023, priced at anywhere between $160, which is what I paid for during the Black Friday sale of 2025. Currently sitting at $200 on the official website and something like $180 on AliExpress and eBay.

Image Quality

While decidedly soft wide open, especially at close focusing distances and towards infinity, the images remain very much usable. Where this lens performs best is around portrait distances, between a meter or so to several meters away, even wide open. It's there this lens finds its sweet spot. Anything closer or farther than that, is where this lens struggles a bit with sharpness. However, while I like that vintage allure, that bit of hazy, glowing softness, I do understand some may prefer more tack-sharp images. So then you either stick to the Goldilocks zone of good sharpness I mentioned earlier or you just stop it down a little.

Color-wise, I think it's equally capable. The Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 makes images that come out vibrant, rich, lively, with bright, vivid colors, which if you shoot RAW do require a bit more saturation added in post-prouction, but you're going to get away with shooting JPEGs just fine, especially on Fujifilm thanks to the many great film simulation recipes available online. This lens renders some of the nicest colors I've seen on any Chinese lens, they're not over the top, but joyous and vivid, full of body and presence.

Sharpness is something I mentioned in this review more so than anything just for the sake of it, because it's nowhere near the top of my priorities. It's character I care about. It's the soul of the lens, and that's what I look for in my images. What surprised me the most is that the images coming out of this lens look like they were taken with a full-frame camera. This is basically a 51.4mm lens, as far as the field of view it renders and and roughly equivalent to f/1.4 in terms of depth of field. Basically a full-frame fast fifty, as it were and the images look exactly like coming from one.

I've been surprised and delighted to find that clean and crisp full-frame character and while part of that is because it allows shooting at much lower ISOs due to the very fast aperture, I feel like there's also something else. I like to call it character. This lens basically upgraded my camera sensor, and took it up a notch in size. Everything about this lens, from skin tones to tonal gradation, from subject separation to the background blur, the razor thin depth of field at larger apertures, everything makes this lens render images that like a full-frame.

There's little I can fault this lens for. And since we're on the subject, let's talk about flaws, because it does have some shortcomings, that are unavoidably going to manifest themselves in a lens that this fast and this cheap. There's quite a fair bit of longitudinal chromatic aberration visible in most circumstances when shooting wide open, but completely negated when shooting black and white, which I mostly do.

Also present is significant color fringing and strong chromatic aberrations. Visible in most high contrast scenes, especially with strong back lighting, but nothing egregious.

There's very little vignetting, so little in fact that I have not been able to make any images that show it. Furthermore, some people have mounted the Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 on full-frame cameras and I've seen it perform surprisingly well. There is some darkening of the corners at wide open on a full-frame sensor, but I think anything over f4, there's no vignetting even on a full-frame sensor, which I think is frankly incredible. On my APS-C sized sensor, there's hardly any vignetting, barely anything at all, so perhaps it was not even worth mentioning.

Flaring is quite temperamental and very capricious. In general the optics of this lens are pretty well behaved. The coatings are doing their job just fine.

There were bound to be compromises at this price point. However, let's not glance over the fact that comparable ultra fast fifties from the vintage era often cost just as much, if not more than this does and they perform just about the same. And even considering all of that, I think this is a lot of lens for not that much money.

It's in black and white where this lens trully shines. The tones are punchy and vigorous, the blacks are inky and dark and there's quite a bit of detail even in the darkest of shadows. Highlights are bright and lively, yet not easily burnt. It's quite difficult to make this lens clip information. You have to really push it and mess up your exposure, but with good technique this lens has a very great tonal gradation. Mid tones are energetic, full of body, with good texture and overall, the images have a very nice sheen to them, a bright, charming lustre.

Conclusion

I'm absolutely enamored with this lens. The Brightin Star 35mm f/0.95 is a wonderful lens, one of the very best I have ever used and to this day, my second favorite lens ever. Brilliantly designed, excellently built, more than fairly priced, with an image performance to really write home about, hardly anything at all to fault it for, this lens is essential to my Fujifilm kit.