7Artisans 7.5mm f/2.8 fisheye lens review (vs Samyang/Rokinon/Bower 7.5mm fisheye)
In the last few years, we have seen a number of new lens manufacturers from China. 7Artisans is new comer and they have just released a bunch of lenses.
The 7Artisans 7.5mm fisheye lens is a manual focus lens with no electronic components inside. The size is fairly compact but feel very solid thanks to its metal construction. The aperture ring and focus ring are both smooth but I feel there is a tiny bit of play when I try to rotate them. The aperture ring has a click-less design, which seems to be a trend for most of the lenses from China for some reason. As I’m mainly a photographer, I would certainly prefer the aperture ring to have clicks or even better if they can make it a switchable design.
The lens has a built-in detachable metal lens hood which is solid and nice shaped. But I don’t see why anyone would want to remove the lens hood as the lens hood provides some physical protection to the extruded front element and you’ll also need the lens hood for the lens cap to attach on to.
The lens cap is made of soft plastic and does look/feel a it cheap. When I first got the lens, I wasn’t too happy about it as the lens cap is really tight when attached to the lens. I felt I would easily damage the paint on the lens hood every time when I remove the lens cap. But after using the lens for about a week, the lens cap has loosened up a bit and now I’m actually super happy with it. The lens cap is still tight enough that I don’t think it would fall off by itself, but it’s not super tight anymore so I no longer worry that I might damage the lens hood when I take it off. It would be interesting to see how it will be like after say 6 months or 1 year but so far I think the lens cap is perfect function wise. Much better than my Nikon AF 16mm f/2.8 fisheye at least as the lens cap for that lens can easily fall off even when the lens was brand new.
As I said at the beginning, the lens has no electronic components and therefore it doesn’t have any electronic contacts at the lens mount. This is pretty common for a lot of third party manual focus lenses. But one thing that is not so common, and actually a bit of issue is, you could kind of mount the 7Artisans fisheye lens onto the camera even if you put it on at incorrect angle. Check the end of my unboxing video and you’ll see how I could mount it onto the camera incorrectly. I have to say this is the first time I noticed this kind of issue with all the micro four thirds lenses I’ve used. While it may not cause damage to your camera/lens, you might be confused why the lens doesn’t “click” when you try to mount it onto the camera. And what even worse is, if you didn’t notice the lens has not clicked/locked onto the camera, you may end up dropping the lens.
