7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 Review

I have here the widest lens I have ever used. Possibly the widest lens I have ever seen in the flesh. Certainly the widest rectilinear lens. The lens I am talking about is the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 manual focus lens.

If my memory serves, the widest lens I have previously used was the 12mm Voigtlander made for m-mount. Honestly, to me that lens seemed almost unusably wide. Since then, there’s been a whole bunch of crazy ultra wide lenses released including the Laowa 9mm f/5.6 and Voigtlander 10mm 5.6, but I’ve not tried either. I’ve just never felt any real desire to shoot lenses this wide. In fact I totally forgot those two lenses even existed when I first received this lens. The widest I ever tend to shoot regularly is my 18mm Batis which I used for interior shots and a bit of architectural photography for work. Even that seems wide to me. It’s practically a telephoto lens compared to the 9mm!

That said, when I was offered the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 for review, I found it nigh on impossible to say no. Intrigue just got the better of me I suppose. Beyond really the quality of the lens, I just wondered what I’d be able to shoot with such a crazy bit of kit. As I talked about in my article extolling the virtues of the short tele, shooting lenses like this is always going to be a challenge to do successfully. Scenes that have plenty of foreground interest as well as a subject thats somehow big enough or majestic enough to warrant such a wide perspective are needed. That or you have to get really creative with making sure you have lots of context to capture around a subject. Certainly for my tastes a lens like this is of no use for the sort of normal interior work I do for Architects, holiday houses and estate agents etc – the results would just be far to distorted to be useful.

Just how wide is this lens

9mm just means nothing to me – I have no sense of what that means in real life. I can picture 50mm, I can even think in 18mm or close enough to be able to walk into a room for eg and know what I’ll get in shot from whichever corner of the room I stand in. 9mm, nope, I have no point of reference at all. One thing that really blew my mind when trying to get my head around it was that even on a crop sensor this lens is equivalent to 13.5mm. When I was just getting into photography in a big way 20 or so years ago, the Nikon 14mm AF-D was the holy grail of rectilinear wide angle lenses for me. This lens is wider than that when on a ~1.5x crop apsc camera.

Ok, so all of this still doesn’t mean much. To help demonstrate, I have taken the following photos with a 50mm, 18mm and then 9mm. I had the camera on a tripod right at the edge of the stage of a theatre I was working in.

Does that help? Wide, isn’t it?!

What’s amazing to me is that it’s this wide and rectilinear. I can get my head around a fisheye lens much easier. They are just bonkers and make the world look crazy so it’s somehow easier to fathom that they are so wide.

So the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 must be the widest full frame lens on the market…? As I said earlier, that’s what I thought when I started playing with it forgetting the Loawa 9mm existed. A quick google reminded me. Another quick google told me that the Loawa is actually a 132 degree field of view lens, whereas this 7Artisans is only 135 degrees. That’s nothing I thought, googling for a comparison. I found one on Philip Reeve in a review of this lens – also worth reading… once you have finished here of course! Over there you will see a comparison that shows the Laowa is actually quite a bit wider. 3 degrees means quite a lot at the wide end of seems. Bastian has also calculated that the Laowa actually works out at 8.9mm and the 7Artisans at 9.5mm so if your looking for as wide as possible, then I guess it’s the Laowa. Personally, I think I’ll probably cope with 9.5mm as being wide enough!

Optics

Ok, that’s a lot of talk about how wide this lens is. I’m sure you get the point, the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 is a very wide angle lens. If you don’t, scroll down to the rest of the pictures below. So what about the rest of the attributes of this lens. Aside from being wide, how well does it perform. The short answer to that question is pretty well!

Distortion

Unusually for me, the first thing I want to talk about is distortion. As I have said this is a rectilinear lens, ie not a fisheye. That is to say, it has been optically designed so straight lines appear straight rather than curved, as is the case with a fisheye lens. That’s the theory at least. It might not surprise you to learn that in practice there is some not so insignificant barrel distortion. It’s far from a fisheye lens, don’t get me wrong, but the distortion is definitely visible when shooting subjects that have straight lines such as buildings etc. It’s not terrible, but it’s there, and if you want to correct for it in post, of course your going to crop the image slightly thus losing a bit of the extreme wide angle-ness. Not that it makes much odds really. It’s still crazy wide… did I mention that already?!

Sharpness

Back in the early days of 7Artisans lenses when their kit used to inexplicably have DJ Optical written on it, the wide angle lenses they used to churn out were pretty reliably shoddy when it came to the evenness of the focus from one side of the image to the other. I always put this down to decentered or tilted optics. I have since learned that the wider the lens, the more accurate the centring of the optics within it needs to be. This is, I assume, why the wider the lenses made by DJ Optical got, the poorer they were.

I don’t know anything of the story, but neither this lens or another 7Artisans lens I have been reviewing recently have the DJ Optical name on, and both are much more even in terms of the sharpness from one side of the frame to the other. I’ve no idea if this is causation or correlation. For all I know, the lenses might still be made by the same company just the with DJ optical name taken off…? It matters not. What matters is that this lens is evenly sharp across the frame.

Of course, that’s not to say it is perfectly sharp into the corners, there is definitely a little bit of fall off to softer, more smeary corners. It’s pretty spot on across most of the frame though.

Vignetting

It feels like it could go without saying, but this lens also vignettes quite heavily. I’ve said this a lot of times in a variety of contexts, but this sort of vignetting doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, really, with a lens this wide, it’s a help rather than a hindrance in my opinion.

Flare

I’ve found that given the right circumstances, the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 can flare quite significantly as demonstrated below. These images were shot with the sun just out of the frame which given the right angle, seemed to cause this big blue bit of ghosting. Moving just a little bit fixed it.

Shooting directly into the sun at f/5.6 can make for an interesting effect too, but stopping down just to f/8 fixes the issue. You can also see the sun star effect in the second image in case your are into that sort of thing.

Interestingly, looking at Bastian’s review, his copy of the lens didn’t flare as much. I’m not sure if this is copy variance, or just that I managed to trigger flare in a way that Bastian just didn’t find – either way, it’s possibly worth bearing in mind.

Bokeh

… ha! 9mm f/5.6. Not likely! Joking aside, of course it is possible to get some out of focus background if you focus really close. And this lens does focus pretty close at 20cm. But really, even at that distance, the background is hardly out of focus and not really worthy of comment.

Depth-of-field

In fact, it’s actually quite hard to get anything out of focus at all with the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6. You can totally ignore the depth of field scale on the top of the lens, it’s meaningless garbage. I’ve no idea to what circle of confusion it’s been calculated (if at all) but it’s really the most conservative scale I have ever seen on a lens. It says you need to set the lens to f/16 and about 2m to get 0.8m to infinity in focus.

In fact, you can set the lens to f/5.6 and set it to about 0.8 meters and get basically everything in focus aside from what’s very close. Of course, one man’s acceptable focus is different to the next, so your mileage may vary, but unless you’re pixel peeping at 300% I’m sure you’ll find this lens very easy indeed to focus with! It is worth noting that the copy I have here seems to focus past infinity, but I haven’t focused it to infinity once since I’ve used it, so I’m not sure that matters really. Just means not using the focus stop to focus at far distances.

Mechanics and Build Quality

Thankfully those are pretty much the only faults I can find with the design and build of the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6. Probably the only real other shortcoming is the lack of filter thread, but I don’t really use filters that often so it doesn’t really bother me particularly.

Aside from that, the 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 feels very solid. The lens mount looks to be made of slightly thin black material, but the body and built in hood of the lens feel robust. The focusing mechanism is nicely damped – slightly toward the heavier end, which is probably a slight advantage with a lens that doesn’t really need focusing that much. The aperture is also smoothly damped with clicks at full stops and whatever the half stop between f/5.6 and f/8 is. It also comes with a nice lens cap that smoothly slots over the metal hood.

Mind the sea sickness

The last thing I wanted to mention was quite an odd phenomenon that I’ve had whilst framing with this camera. I have walked around with it looking at the screen on the back of the camera and found myself feeling motion sick. I’m not even joking here…

A few more photos

Final thoughts

The 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 lens is nuts. What’s really nuts about it is how good it is whilst being so extreme. Having tried a few very wide angle lenses by Chinese brands back when they were finding their feet I’d all but written off the possibility of them ever being much use to anyone with even a slightly discerning eye. As it turns out this lens proves that those times have passed. Or at least this copy of this lens does. As does the copy Bastian had – though oddly, in subtly different ways. It’s true it flares (my copy at least), and gets a little softer into the corners, but really, given the spec, I can’t help but be impressed with it.

What remains of course is finding stuff that can be shot with such a wide angle lens and not look crap. I really do find lenses like this challenging, though I must admit, I have had more fun with it than I’d have thought I might. If you’re and ultra-wide shooter with those skills, and want to try a lens at the very extreme end, then the bonkers 7Artisans 9mm f/5.6 is a really surprisingly capable option!

You can find out more about this lens on the 7Artisans shop here (this is also an affiliate link, so I get a kickback if you buy one)

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