TTArtisan 25mm f2 for Fujifilm X Review

Hello friends,

It’s been a while since the last post, which is probably going to be a recurring theme for this newsletter.

I’ve been sitting on my photos for a while, doing a bit of a soul searching on what kind of work I want to produce. Sometimes, somehow, it seems like the more I shoot, the less I like the photos I get. That’s quite a head-scratcher.

I have a few new “recipe reviews” in the works soon. Photos on this post are shot on these 2 new recipes. But before that, today I want to share my experience with this little lens I found, which has quickly become my new favorite toy. The…

TTArtisan 25mm f2

I wanted to get on the 35mm equiv focal length without breaking the bank, and this thing turned out to be so fun that I’m kinda addicted to using it now. Let’s get into it.

First, the thing that always look for: weight and size.

This thing very much surpassed my expectations, being pretty much a pancake lens. Its size is comparable to the XF27mm f2.8, or the TTArtisan 27mm f2.8 AF, which are some of the smallest lenses on this system. With this lens I can fit the camera on my little “man purse”, which is quite nice!

Now to the good part,

What kind of photos does this lens produce?

Let’s just get this out of the way: if you are attracted to words like “clinical” and “corner to corner” and “sharpness”, there’s not a lot of that in here, so it’s probably time to close this post now.

You still here? Cool.

Wide open, the photos exhibits a bit of “softness” and “low contrast” and sometimes “flaring”, or what I like to call, a “free built in mist filter” 😉. You know, the thing everyone seems to glue on their lenses these days anyways.

No joke, I really love the “low contrast” look I got from this lens wide open. It’s faded, like how you would lift the blacks up in lightroom a bit, which is quite a popular thing people do anyways.

There’s a bit of vignetting, and a bit of swirl in the bokeh, which is quite lovely. Combined with this Kodak Gold recipe I found (review soon!), the output is quite dreamy and vintage. Reminds me of the lens on my Canonet QL17 film camera, which I love.

These “characters” make for quite a nice “portrait” lens. I’m not a portrait shooter, except when I occasionally shoot some for my family, but the results were quite lovely.

Stop it down a bit, and the vignetting goes away. And it's all the sharpness I ever want in the world, but my bar for that is quite low anyways. I actually prefer shooting this wide open if I can get away with it.

Now, I don’t mind all these little quirks, except one little “annoyance” that comes with pretty much all manual lenses: the distortion.

I like shooting straight lines quite a bit in my photos, so having no built in correction profiles is quite annoying. To me that’s the biggest plus of using a lens with electronics.

I still put my jpegs through lightroom to crop and do minor adjustments, so it’s not a big deal overall, as I can create a profile for this lens (+5 distortion in lightroom does it). Still, there will always be a little voice in my mind doubting if the distortion is right and the lines are actually straight!

Conclusion

Overall, for just over 50 bucks, I really can’t complain. I got into the 35mm equiv focal length for cheap. The images are full of characters (which is a plus). It’s like shooting with a vintage lens but it’s actually light and small.

I guess the rumors on the street is these Chinese lens manufacturers copied optical formulas from lenses of the yesteryear, so it’s not a surprise that the output looks like vintage lenses!

Check out the lens here if you’d like (affiliate link). It won’t cost you anything extra and it’ll help me out quite a bit. Thanks!

Anyways, photos on this post were shot with Fujixweekly’s “Ilford HP5” recipe, and a beautiful Kodak Gold-esque recipe I found on a little corner of a facebook group. Subscribe to read my reviews soon™️!

For more gear stuff, read my gear recommendation page.

Disclaimer: Some of the links in the post are affiliate links. You know the drill.