(00:00):
This is one of, if not the smallest full frame lenses you can put on your camera. I've been using the Brightin Star 28mm f/2.8 full frame lens for about three months now. I was mainly interested in this to pair with my LUMIX S9, but of course you can put this on any full frame LUMIX camera. In fact, it's also available for Canon, Nikon, Sony, and Fuji cameras. I'm going to start this review with the facts; just specs, design, dial layout, that sort of thing. Then I'll do some technical tests. I'll talk about what I love and don't love about it, and I'll wrap it up with some tips on getting the most from it.
(00:50):
There's actually only one version of the lens. It has a Leica M Mount, so when you buy it for any other mount, it includes an adapter. It's a completely mechanical lens, so there's no electronic contacts or communication with the camera. I'll show you a tip at the end though on how to get the lens name into the metadata of every photo. It's made of brass and feels very solid, yet weighs just 114 grams on its own, and with the L-Mount adapter, it weighs 157 grams. I'd imagine the other mounts are very similar in weight. The lens only sticks out about 21 millimeters from the body, so it's really, really small. On a larger camera like the Lumix S1R, it's actually more shallow than the grip! Aperture is controlled by this front ring here, which can be a bit of a problem, and we'll address that in a bit.
(01:38):
The aperture ranges from f/2.8 to f/16. This little nub or handle at the bottom of the lens is what you grab to focus. The lens shows the focus range in both meters and feet, and the closest focusing distance is 0.7 meters or 2.3 feet, which isn't that close. More on that later as well. I got mine with a UV filter, which I definitely recommend. The lens includes a lens cap, but it's this tiny – obviously – metal screw-in cap and you're never going to want to keep that on as it's way too tedious to take off. I treat the UV filter as a transparent lens cap. I've been using the lens for a few months now. I've never taken the filter off and it has zero scratches. It's made of black lacquered brass, so it's got this cool black and gold look to it. It's a six piece five group optical structure and a nine blade aperture for those who are interested in those sort of details.
(02:32):
Pricing is $339.99 US for just the lens With an adapter, prices range from 386.98 to 390.98 The filter adds 35.99 to the price, which honestly feels pretty expensive for a tiny UV filter, but I also couldn't find one online for any cheaper, so it is what it is. Also, they do market it as a lens cap replacement, so I say go for it if you're going to pick up this lens. I don't normally do this sort of testing, but I felt with this lens that it was important to do. While no one would use this lens to photograph art or photograph a wall full of newspapers, this is a great way to evaluate edge to edge sharpness, curvature, vignetting, and color cast. So before we get started, I would never expect this lens to be a perfectly clean, technically flawless lens. It's far too small and inexpensive to be that.
(03:32):
I do expect this to be a lens with its own character quirks and flaws that add to its personality. This series of tests is so that you can see the characteristics of this little lens in a controlled environment. All the photos are shot with the UV filter since that's how I'm recommending you use the lens. These photos are shot at about a one meter distance racking from f/2.8 to f/11, and I did refocus between each shot. In my first rounds of tests where I focused at f/2.8 and then left it there, I found that it got progressively softer up to about f/8 when it went back to being sharp, but once I refocused at each aperture, I found the test to be much more consistent. Also, these are all JPEGs straight out of camera. First I'll cycle through the series from f/2.8 to f/11.
(04:19):
A couple of things jump out at me right away. There's a big vignette shift between f/2.8 and f/4. From f/4 to f/11, it's barely there, but at f/2.8 it's significant. You'll also notice an apparent zoom between f/4 and f/5.6. Since I did refocus at each aperture, I'd attribute that to focus breathing. You can also see a slight curvature of the lens, but that's really to be expected from a 28mm, especially one of this size. Now let's look more closely at the center. Comparing f/2.8 versus f/4, f/2.8 is slightly lower contrast, which I'd say makes the image appear less sharp. From f/4 to f/11, the center is very consistent, but at f/16 it does appear slightly softer again, but that is to be expected when stopping a lens all the way down. Now let's go to the edge where you can see a dramatic soft focus and even smearing at f/2.8, which is further enhanced by the vignetting we looked at earlier. It gets progressively less blurry through the range, but the biggest delta is between f/4 and f/5.6.
(05:30):
Next, I wanted to look at color shifting. I started by putting the Panasonic Lumix S 24mm lens on which is a very clean lens and setting a custom white balance in camera using an X-Rite card. Here's a photo through the Panasonic lens of the card at f/2.8 and f/5.6. You can see it's perfectly neutral with virtually no vignetting. Then using the Panasonic lenses custom white balance, I switched to the Brightin Star lens. Here you can see two things; a notable vignette and a notable color shift. Then I made a new custom white balance with the Brightin Star. Now you can see that the center is neutral, however, the vignette has a color cast to it, so the vignette from the lens is three things; an exposure vignette, a focus vignette, and even a cooling vignette, adding a bit of blue or white balance shift around the edges.
(06:24):
To reiterate, I don't see this as a bad thing. That's just the character of the lens. I spent a lot of money over the years buying old lenses on eBay and adapting them to my cameras to get away from that crisp, pristine look of modern lenses. This lens gives you that somewhat vintage effect in a brand new lens. One final thing I wanted to test for was chromatic aberration. That's not really a studio test, so here's a shot of sun reflecting on the water. There's a bit of chromatic aberration in here, but nothing detrimental or too unexpected. One thing you don't want to test and certainly not on blind faith is the integrity of your hard drives. The question is never IF one of your drives will fail, but WHEN, and when it does, you want to be sure you're backed up, not just locally but offsite as well.
(07:10):
The easiest way to ensure you're always backed up and can access your files from anywhere at any time is to use this episode's sponsor, Backblaze. Backblaze is the set it and forget it backup system. Once installed, it runs silently, continuously in the background. Of course, if you want to pause the backup to free up bandwidth to upload your latest YouTube video, you can do that with just one click pausing for a couple of hours before it automatically resumes. You can set scheduled backups if you prefer, and even manually throttle bandwidth if you want, although leaving it on fully automatic is certainly easiest. Setting up your backups so you never have to think about your backup is the best way to ensure that you are backed up. You can test backblaze for yourself for free. Head to backblaze.com/PhotoJoseph to download the installer and get a free trial. Let it back up for a week or two. Then log into your account and browse your computer files and see how much of your precious data is already secure. backblaze.com/PhotoJoseph, don't forget the /PhotoJoseph, so they know that I sent you. And now let's get personal and talk about what I like and don't like about this lens.
(08:26):
What do I like or dislike about the lens? Well, first of all, its most obvious advantage? It's tiny, really, really tiny. It pairs beautifully with the LUMIX S9 as an everyday carry lens. It's super lightweight and on a small camera, it's awesome. The focus knob is easy to grab, and with focus peaking enabled, it's easy – enough – to focus accurately. We'll talk more about focus peaking in the tips segment later on. The apture dial is hard to grab and you of course have to look down at it to know what you're doing. That in itself isn't a problem, however, it does get bumped in my bag and a little too easily. I keep it in my everyday carry bag from Peak Design and more than once I've found that the aperture had moved accidentally. The UV filter does protect it from being bumped for the most part, but the fact remains that I have found it at f/16 more than once.
(09:17):
I wouldn't call it a problem, but it's something to be aware of. Closest focus is too far away. At 0.7 meters or two feet, three and a half inches, y ou can't get close enough for a portrait. Now, sure, at 28mm, this is not a portrait lens, but as an everyday carry, it needs to do it all and my kind of use-case example of what you can't do with this lens is take a picture of someone across the dinner table. If you're at dinner and you want a photo of the people you're with, you're going to have to scoot your chair back a little bit, but that really is my only real complaint. If that's not a big deal for you or it's a sacrifice you're willing to make, then this really is a superb everyday carry lens. I love the look of it.
(09:56):
Yes, the edges get soft, but that's part of the character of the lens. Paired with Realtime LUT, which is how I'm shooting it almost exclusively, it makes for a great look. And of course you can shoot video with it as well. As you may have noticed, these segments are shot with the Brightin Star 28mm at f/4 at its closest distance of 0.7 meters, and it's being recorded in 6K RAW on my S5IIX. Other than this, I've shot very little video with it as it's more a photography lens for me, but obviously you can shoot video if you want to. Okay, let me give you a few tips on getting the most from this lens.
(10:39):
Focus Peaking is critical here. It's too easy to miss focus on a lens this wide while looking at a small LCD and unfortunately since the LUMIX S9 doesn't have a viewfinder, it can be especially difficult in bright light to know if you're truly in focus. Here's how to set up focus peaking to make sure you get the most from it. Go into the camera menu and you can access this from either the camera or the video menu. Go to focus and then focus peaking, and then to SET. The “focus peaking sensitivity”, you can adjust here, but I'm actually going to show you in a little bit how to set this up so that you can quickly access this without having to dive into the menu. I'll just leave it at +2 for now. Then the display color; you can choose any of these colors, but typically red or blue works best.
(11:23):
You can see on the screen here that red and blue are quite easy to see, but of course you can choose whatever you like in there. Display during auto focus, doesn't matter to us now, and then display during manual focus has three choices. These are really important to set up right. First of all, “while in live view” should be on, and that of course is what you're going to mainly be seeing when you're looking at the back of the viewfinder. “While live view is enlarged” is also on because we want to be able to see that peaking when we punch into the shot, and I'm going to show you how to set that up as well. And then finally, under “when shutter is pressed”, I like to leave that off. That way when I'm focusing, I see the focus peaking lines, but then as soon as I half press the shutter, the lines go away so I can see my scene more clearly. And now that that's set up, I can see my focus peaking very, very clearly.
(12:07):
Now remember, I set the peaking sensitivity to +2 which means that we're going to see the most amount of peaking on screen at once. If I want to adjust that quickly, what I can do is use one of the Fn buttons (the function buttons) on my camera to access that menu with one click. I've set the down-push on the rocker for that. To reset it, simply press and hold on it, and then a menu comes up and change that menu to “focus peaking sensitivity”. Now, when I push down on the rocker, it immediately brings up the focus peaking sensitivity so I can adjust it on the fly. The reason you might want to change this is in some scenes you get a ton of peaking on there and it's distracting and it's hard to tell whether you're actually in focus or not because so much appears to be in focus, while in others – mainly lower contrast scenes – it can be quite difficult to get any peaking at all, so being able to quickly adjust that can really be to your advantage. Now let's look at setting up what's called “manual focus zoom assist”. That's where you can punch into the shot to get more critical focus; like this. Once I punch in, I can zoom in and out even more and move that window around.
(13:13):
I want to assign this to the “AF ON” button on my LUMIX S9. To do that, simply press and hold the AF ON button for a couple of seconds, which will bring up this menu, and you can see that I've set mine to “AF mode”. Why AF mode? Well, this way, when I'm using an auto focus lens, that button will bring up the auto focus modes, but when in manual focus, it just punches into the frame. With mechanical lenses like this one, you don't get the lens metadata into your photos. You won't have the lens model, the aperture or focal length metadata that you'd expect with an electronic lens. While there's no way to get the aperture or focal length in, we can get the name of the lens in place. This is actually a byproduct of setting up image stabilization, which you definitely want to do anyway, but now you'll see the importance of doing it cleanly.
(14:00):
To set that up, go into the menu, navigate to the gear menu, lens, and then to lens information, choose a blank spot and select it to set it up. Here, we'll take a look at the one that I've already created. You have three things to set. First, you need to set up the focal length. This, of course is important so that the camera knows how much it should shift the sensor for any given lens. Next, you can set up the IS area or the image stabilization area. This is an interesting setup where if you have a lens that has a visible vignette, and I'm not talking about a little bit of shading, but an actual dark line around the ring, you can set it up so that you're actually punching into the shot just a little bit just past that ring. If that ring is in the shot and the camera is stabilizing the image, then you could end up seeing that black line moving in and out of the frame.
(14:46):
So to set that up, you go into this menu and it's best if you have something nice and bright to look at, like the white table down here in the corner, and then as I scroll through the options from 70 to a hundred percent, you can see how it's ever so slightly cropping into the image. If you were to see a dark ring on the corner at a hundred percent, but you didn't see it at 90 or 80 or even 70, then you could crop past that. In my case, there is no need to crop, so I'll leave it at a hundred percent. And then finally set the lens name, and I definitely recommend setting not only a complete lens name in here, but if you're working with multiple cameras to make sure that you set the exact same name on all of your cameras. That way when you're looking at your photos in Lightroom or wherever you manage them, you'll be able to do a search by that precise name and come up with all the shots made with that camera.
(15:32):
I recommend shooting at f/4 to f/5.6 or so to get the best of this lens. We saw in the tests that wide open at f/2.8 was lower contrast and therefore appeared softer, and of course, you're never going to get the best out of any lens at its smallest aperture, so I'd stay away from both extremes. We saw both heavy focus falloff and vignetting at f/2.8. While at f/4, the focus falloff was still there, but the vignetting was mostly gone, and at f/5.6, both were much less noticeable. If you like that softer edge shoot at f/4, if you want a cleaner edge to edge, then go to f/5.6 and maximum edge sharpness seems to hit around f/8. That said, I saw another reviewer say that the focus plane with this lens is curved, so presumably if you focus on something in the center, while subjects on the same plane will be soft, something closer to the camera around the edges might actually be in focus.
(16:27):
Interesting! I didn't test for that, but it seems feasible. Also, since it is a manual focus lens, a little extra depth of field can work to your advantage. Set to f/5.6 at a focus distance of about two meters, everything from one and a half to four meter range should be in focus At four meters, you're looking at about two and a half meters to nearly infinity being in focus. That makes critical focus less important, but of course you do still want to be as sharp as possible, so pay attention to that focus peaking. Overall, I really like the lens. I love the size. You can't beat that. Yes, it's manual focus, but that doesn't bother me. I like being a bit more deliberate about my still photography anyway, and if I'm taking snapshots, I'll just use my iPhone. I use the S9 and this lens to be more “artsy” anyway, it would be easier to focus with a viewfinder, but that's a problem with the S9, not the lens. At over $400 with the filter, it's not a cheap lens and it's twice the price of the LUMIX 26mm f/8 pancake lens, but of course this is f/2.8, not f/8, which is a three stop difference. That's a lot. In fact, if you'd like to see a comparison of the Panasonic 26mm f/8 pancake to this Brightin Star 28mm f/2.8, lemme know in the comments. That would be kind of fun to do. Also, if you found the inclusion of the camera data for every shot in this video useful, let me know. It occurred to me that I use a lot of different gear in my videos and it might be interesting to some of you to know what shots were made with what gear, and if you don't care, let me know that too. It's obviously extra work, but I don't mind doing it if you guys find it useful. If you enjoy videos on funky lenses, check out this playlist. I got a bunch of 'em.
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