Pergear 25mm 1.7 lens in MFT mount Review – A fantastic little jewel of a lens.

This is a review of the Pergear 25mm 1.7 lens in MFT mount. I was kindly sent this by Pergear to review, thanks to Hamish and Sabrina for arranging this.

It’s listed for sale on their site at $75 or £62 and available for all popular Mirrorless Mounts. I was initially reluctant to review a manual focus lens as the only mirrorless I have is an old Olympus E-PM1 possibly the most basic Olympus MFT camera ever made. It lacks any precise and easy to use manual focus aid such as Focus Peaking and lacks an EVF.

The only Manual Focus aid it has is a magnified mode where you set the record button as a magnifier – zoomed right in you can adjust focus (if you can keep your hands still enough) then press again for the actual image once you’ve set focus. This is a useful feature but I found myself often just setting the hyperfocal distance from 3 ft to infinity at f11 for some of the shots.

I’m a fair weather snapper, if the light isn’t right then it’s no photos. With the horrible weather there simply wasn’t much of a window of opportunity for me to shoot much. I’d also just had a knee operation two days earlier so mobility was an issue – coupled with poor close eyesight I was expecting a disaster. Fortunately, things panned out betting than expected…

Back to the Pergear 25mm 1.7 lens. It arrived beautifully packaged and boxed, complete with a nice soft pouch. The lens itself is impressive: Small and diminutive, suiting the size of the small Olympus nicely. It’s all metal with a lovely hefty build quality with no play or feel of loose parts anywhere. It feels nicely finished and CNC’d.

It reminds me of the lenses of yore; rangefinder lenses which are like little jewels in the hand and the nice cold feel of metal on the finger tips. Focussing is smooth and nicely damped with no play and is precise, with absolutely no creep! Aperture control is also notchy and has satisfying feel.

The Peargear 25mm f1.7 optics themselves are multi coated – I’d have wished the coating would have a signature color to it such as my Pentax lenses have but this is priced as a budget lens.

In use it worked wonderfully for me. Even with the unsuitable camera it performed much better than I had expected. It focussed close to about 6 inches – and I managed to grab a shot wide open which is shown here.

The coatings are excellent – it handles ghosting and flare remarkably well. These were shot straight into the light and give an idea of how the lens flares at its worst.

The Pergear 25mm 1.7 lens is sharp – sharp wide open and when closed down pretty much as good as I’d ever need. I’m no pixel peeper and haven’t really understood the obsession with sharpness as I prefer a softer image as it has more feel to it and doesn’t present itself as a clinical digital hit. My usage is non scientific and solely based on contrast, look and feel of the image. But even so when on a desktop computer screen zoomed in everything was detailed and resolved very well. As you can see from the images everything has a pleasing contrast, nice detail and good resolution.

If I have any complaints it’s that the scale on the lens is quite limited but it’s easy enough with the lines to the right of the red dot being f11, f16 and f22 – not sure about the rest but these worked for me.

Overall even under difficult conditions (physically) bad light with an awful grey overcast winter – with a camera completely unsuited to manual focus – I managed to get some acceptable photographs of Mistley Towers at the Stour Estuary near my home.

I shot a few portraits at f1.7 and f2.8. f/2.8 is of course my preferred option for portraits as with the cropped sensor there’s enough depth of field to keep the subject clean – opening up to f1.7 means you’ll have to be even more careful and selective. I grabbed my boy while still in pyjamas and told him to grab the slumbering cat (now much bigger than when he vanished once (in my Cat and His Boy one shot story). These were shot at f1.7:

Out of focus areas are pretty and nicely rendered. In focus areas are sharp. I then got Mrs Ibbs to pose for me as she was going out shopping, in hindsight I should’ve used ISO 400 rather than base ISO (some images suffer camera shake). These were shot at f2.8:

If using a MFT camera I’d recommend one with an EVF and focus peaking to get the most from the Pergear 25mm 1.7 lens. With that said, for me, this is still a 5 star product. Is priced lower than plastic kit lenses and is built beautifully for the money. It’s a small compact lens so can be popped into a pocket. Focus feels precise and nicely damped with no play or creep. Images are very pleasing and contrasty with good detail, rendering and nice resolution. Any light falloff you see has been applied by me in LR. Ghosting and flare and glare is very nicely handled. It focusses close at 6 inches. The 50mm equivalent focal length is a classic length and can suits many types of photography. Overall fantastic – It’s given me a reason to upgrade this camera to something more useful.

Sometimes I do wish more of these new lenses were offered in an M42 mount – as then we could use and enjoy them on our old 35mm SLR’s or obsolete DSLR’s as well.

You can find out more about this lens here

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