Bokehlicious, CA-tastic with a side of Vignette! Fujian 35/1.7!

[unpopular]

I stumbled on some reviews of this little fast 35 from China. On paper, it's a terrible lens. It barely covers APS-C (if you can even say that it covers, vignette is pretty severe), it's soft - like REALLY soft, and has such extreme CA, even slightly OOF will glow. Even when it's sharp, it's not really sharp (though does OK around f/2ish), the spherical aberration is such that you can actually almost manage to get it to focus in two places at once (ok, that's kind a cool, actually), when you stop down below about f/8 everything goes to mush, and if you screw on the hood too tight, the helical comes apart when you unscrew it! It focusses past infinity, I figured the stop was just miscalibrated, but the stop cannot be adjusted - and when you try to focus on infinity it's lack of resolution prevents it from happening.

But, there is just something really neat about this lens. When it's not flaring, contrast is pretty good, and when it is flaring the quality is gauzy and dreamy. The bokeh is pretty nice, albeit a bit swirly (which isn't my thing, though not over the top - and oddly, it's almost oval-shaped?).

For $25, not bad - somewhere between a hipster toy and a useable lens - even if not always very practical.

 

[Derrel]

"Holy Coke bottle bottom, Bat Man! That lens is awful!"

"Oh, but it is awful in a good, way, my young masked apprentice. It's like my kinky bondage encounters with Alfred....sometimes some things can hurt so much that they start to feel good!"

"Gosh, Batman, I have no idea what you mean by that. Is that like when I racked myself on the Bat Pole and you massaged the afflicited areas?"

"I thought we agreed we would never speak of that incident, Robin..."

"Sorry Bat Man...but golly jeepers, that lens has some majorly swirly bokeh."

"Indeed it does Robin, indeed it does. Word on the street is it was derived from Canon's earliest 35mm lens design in the late 1940's."

 

[unpopular]

LOL - It's not as bad as some of the Soviet tilt-a-whirl lenses. And NOTHING is as bad as the Xenon 50/0.95 "vomit comet".

 

[Derrel]

No, it's actually NOT super-swirly...it is in fact, one of the nicer "swirly bokeh" lenses I've seen recently. I looked the thing up online...it's available in some nifty colored barrel versions, like a nice blue anodized aluminum barrel, also a sort of olive drab/yellow mixed color barrel, bright aluminum color, blackened aluminum also....prices are reasonable. For $25 to $40, seems like it might be fun to have. I enjoy the Lensbaby effects lens photos...this is sorta' along those lines, but with that swirling background that adds the lensy look.

What are you shooting this on? I see on eBay there's a lot of NEX kits for it, with the C-mount to NEX adapter being probably the #1 package.

 

[unpopular]

It's C-Mount on an X-E1. I payed under 30 for mine with a metal hood and a C-XF adapter. It seems NEX doesn't vignette as much as the X-Trans does, and it's well suited on m4/3 - though, probably the swirl would be minimized.

Plus, it will make your camera look totally derptastic.

By far, the weirdest thing is how you can get two places almost in focus.