AstrHori 14mm f/4.5 Lens (Canon EF-M, Black)

I didn't buy this lens for its quality optics or its sexy looks, I bought it for a creative project I'm shooting in black-and-white square format. The 1:1 crop factor moots any minor issues with edge sharpness and vignetting. The pancake design makes it easy to carry around and unobtrusive in public places. Manual focus is required, but practically everything is in focus when set to infinity. I'm using it paired with my Fujifilm X-T5 and the results are stunning. The absurdity of putting a €90 lens on a €1,700 camera and making art is very satisfying, indeed!

I picked this lens up only to practice wide angle composition while saving my pennies for the Sigma 10-18. I thought, why not. It was so dirt cheap, so I didn't expect much in the way of image quality. After using it for about a month, this lens has been like a fun blind date where you love what you see and your date looks good on your arm (IE: this lens looks super good on your camera), and the two of you have a lot of fun together, but when you get down to the nitty gritty of what you each want out of life (IE, pixel peeping), you know from the results of those answers you'll eventually be moving on -- even if, in the meantime, you can still have a lot of fun. I've spent thousands of dollars on FF-AF lenses. They are fast, they are accurate, and they deliver stellar picture quality. This lens is MF, it is APSC, it is soft, and the invariable f4.5 depth of field makes you work for every dog-bamned shot; and yet, I find myself always looking forward to using it. Why? Answer: Build quality. Every one of my other lenses, as stellar as they are, are all-plastic construction. Golly this lens is just sooo nice to hold in the hand, and it gives your camera a very old-timey, this-is-a-real-silver-on-emulsion box-camera feel -- even though the lens is sitting on your modern mirrorless. The end results are similar to the impression: you get a very filmic, if soft, image as your reward for all the work it takes to get a good image out of this lens. Every now and then I do manage to nail focus on an image, so I also know it is a matter of practice. But when taking that image, the view in the viewfinder is so wide and the object so tiny that it's difficult to see what is or is not in focus. A word to the wise: keep your focus peeking turned on, and map your focus magnifier to a convenient button and use it often, if you want any hope of getting a decent image when using this lens. In post, when you go a-peeping, you will find that something about this lens gives the image a very oil-painting-like look. It is unique, artistic, and it absolutely could have its place in professional work (I'm thinking moody scenes here) if you're willing to put in the work needed to get that image, but most of the time you won't get razor sharp image boundaries even when you nail focus. Interestingly, the one area where this lens seems to do better than acceptably well is video. There is no focus breathing during a focus pull, and of course, being manual focus, there is no focus hunting and the lens is absolutely silent. If you place your subject into the infinity range first, video is quite nice and very usable. However, because of the fixed 4.5 depth of field, which is surprisingly narrow when you are shooting wide, there is always something out of focus: mostly everything that's closest to the lens. Is this lens usable enough for real estate, wedding, or Indie venues? If you're in a bind and you need that super-wide angle, it would be better than nothing, but the same shot taken with any comparable Sigma, Samyang, Viltrox or native lens is going to be higher quality with much less work. Still, it's a dirt-cheap, all-metal construction lens that makes you want to keep using it. Like that fun blind date, you keep calling the person back and going out, even though you know you'll never get married.