The disruptive 50mm low-light lens from the Far East
A good test of a lens or camera is to use it side-by-side with the setup you usually would use, edit the results as one batch of photos, and then look at how many of the photos you liked were made with which camera and lens combo.
In this test, the conclusion is simply, “Yes, the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 is worth having”.
I’ve done similar “tests” before. I generally don’t compare equipment. I believe that you choose your weapon and make the best out of it. You don’t compare small details to see which is best in performance. The ultimate test – and the only worth doing – is, do I like it or don’t I like it?
I once tested the Leica SL and the Leica M side-by-side, and I felt the Leica SL was a really nice camera to use (and it is), and it felt like what I did would be awesome. But in several portrait sessions, when I had finished editing, there were none or only one single photo from the Leica SL that made it through. So, no matter how nice and right it felt using the camera, it didn’t deliver the photos I liked.
A comparison between the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M ASPH f/0.95 and the Leica 50mm APO-Summicron-M APSH f/2.0 will show that the 50mm APO delivers outstanding colors, real-life-looking skin detail, a wealth of details and sharpness in even the smallest crop - it looks like it was made with a medium format camera. The 50mm APO is an outstandingly high-performing lens. But, in actual use – for me that is – the portraits made with the Noctilux are better portraits. They transform a more pleasant personality.
I never test things just to test them. I get things to use and when I decide to keep using them, I write about how and why I’ve chosen to use them. The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 came about when I was sitting in the café of the Leica dealer in Jakarta, DOSS and we talked about Voightlander and other lenses, for which my interest is about zero. DOSS has classrooms on the third floor, a real café on the second floor and a real camera store on the ground floor. Nothing is more inspiring than good coffee! I came to think about three fellows in LA who I'm on a text-group with, and they keep raving about this 7artisan lens. So, I felt compelled to ask downstairs if they had one, and they did.
So that was how I bought one. The first non-Leica lens I ever bought, as far as I can recall.
I have a Noctilux and hadn’t felt compelled to try a cheaper version. Nothing compares. But now that we were talking about lenses, I became curious and found myself in a playful mood about getting one.
There are a few things you can say about the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 that tell it isn’t the best lens of the works, and I’ll get back to that. Let’s first establish what it does really well.
First off it takes pleasant portraits that have something special about them. I did a series of Noctilux and 7atisans, and I edited the files, and to some surprise, a lot of the 7artisans made it into final choices.
It has some of the unpredictable qualities of the Leica Thamber f/2.2 "portrait lens", but with a more control of the face in the portrait; and much better control of light from behind, as well as contrast of the image.
The focus mechanism of the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 is not on par with the precision of a Leica lens. The lens comes with a test chart you can lay out on the table to fine-tune the focusing. And it comes with a screw driver to complete the adjustment.
Generally, you have to adjust the focus mechanism 0.5 to 1.0 mm either counter-clockwise or clockwise. You loosen two screws and turn the focus mechanism on the back of the lens. Once you loosen the screws you will experience that it moves almost by itself. So, there goes your fine-tuning. You screw it back on, do a new test and now you do the adjustment more carefully.
I found that I just didn’t trust the focusing mechanism much. Also focusing on something at infinity, the lens couldn’t stretch the focusing that far. In other words, not very precise.
Doesn’t matter, I can just use it with the EVF, and so I did, and so I will in the future. It’s of course ironic that a $400 lens requires a $550 EVF to use, but I take it that most of you already own the EVF.
An important point with the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 is the narrow focus, and it’s only of use if the focus is actually precise. In a portrait, that focus is on the eyes (or the eye closest to the camera) and then it really sings.
It can be used without the EVF for street photography and many other things. I used mine for a day without the EVF before I realized it was not exactly in focus. It was rather off, but the images still worked. With some patience, I’m sure one can adjust the focus to be quite good for most things. But for portraits where I want the eyes to be in total focus, I will use an EVF.
The 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 is not a lens for architecture. Most horizontal lines wll have an arc, and it’s even a little uneven as such. Considering the things you would use this lens for (having such great atmosphere and such narrow focus) there are few cases it might matter that the lines of the room are a little funny. Usually they would be out of focus anyways.
This building looks like it's glued together cartonage, but in real life it's actually pretty precise and very straight. The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 creates curves and waves. Not a problem for a portrait and most other things, only when straight lines actually count. Leica M10-P with 7artisans 50mm f/1.1.
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For Leica M, not for Leica CL and Leica TL
The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 extrude so far back into the camera body that it unfortunnately won't fit on the Leica CL and Leica TL, and as far as I know also the Leica SL (which should have more space, which is why I am not sure).
Is it black or bright?
In terms of reflections, the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 is actually doing well. It doesn't milk out or loose contrast, which it would if it had little or no control of internal reflections between the optical elements.
One way to tell if a lens has 'optimum optics' without having used it yet, is to look at it and see if the glass is black or bright. If the glass is filled with light, it holds light and reflections in and between the lens elements. The iamge will be low contrast and blurry. If it's black, the light goes straight through without much reflections. The iamge will be contrasty and detailed.
Apart from the use of special glass types, coating of lenses is used to remove unwanted reflections. If you look at Leica lenses, they spend a lot of time and resources on painting the edges of their optical elements black. You never see this because it's not visible from the outside, but there is a very exact technology on how to paint the edges with it is exact right. If you ever visit "The Mothership" of Leica Camera AG in Wetzlar, Germany and get a factory tour, you will see how this is done.
The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 has good contrast in the image, which is where low-light lenses usually loose it. It doesn't have the same control of micro-contrast as the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M ASPH f/0.95, and I wouldn't expect a $396.00 machine-made lens to perform as well as a $10,500.00 handmade lens lade.
7artisans 50mm f/1.1 is the poor man's Leica Noctilux
The 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 has been coined “the poor man’s Noctilux”, and while you don’t have to be poor to own and use it, it’s true that you can buy 25-30 of the 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 for the price of a single 50mm Noctilux-M ASPH f/0.95.
The price of the 50mm Noctilux ($10,500) is completely fair. In fact, it’s a miracle - as well as a gift to mankind - that one can even buy a piece of NASA space technology in a retail store. Things of this nature, things that can do what the Noctilux can do, things that can bend the light and bring it back on track, are so far-out and so unbelievable that you would think they don’t exist. But it does, and you can buy one.
That the 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 can be sold for $395 is beyond me. I’ve equipped it with my own ventilated shade, and the E55 shade I make and sell is $169 alone. That’s just a piece of metal, and here they sell a lens with optics, focus mechanism and all for just $395. I would expect a “toy” like this to be at least $1,000. So, even more a reason to buy one.
There's a little more saturation to the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 than the Noctilux. But there is nothing of the clinical coldness you sometimes see in cheap lenses.
Unlike the Noctilux, the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 doesn't show signs of purple fringing - only in very extreme conditions. This is good, and there are several reasons: It's not as sharp a lens, it's using glass types so it can do without purple fringing (becuase it's not a f/0.95 lens it doesn't have to use those glass types), and it's a f/1.1 and not a f/0.95.
Purple fringing comes about when you have high contrast edges combined with sharp sensors; and using optical elements that are able to be used in extreme low-light lenses. You see it in 50mm f/0.95, and you see it in wide-angle lenses f/1.4, but you don't see it in a75mm f/1.25 becuase it's 75mm (and beacuse it's not 0.95).
One of the things that sets the Leica 75mm Noctilux f/1.25 ($12,500) lens apart from everything else is that you can focus as close as 70cm. The 50mm Noctilux f/0.95 only focuses as close as 100 cm.
As any lens with more and more narrow focus tolerance, the closer you get, the more the area between 70cm and 100cm becomes uncharted territory. I didn’t find much use for it with the 75mm Noctilux, but the 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 goes down to 70cm and opens up some interesting possibilities for portraits – without the crop that a 75mm lens has.
(The 50mm and the 75mm Noctilux are similar in many ways because to get a portrait with the shoulders, you have to step further back with the 75mm. This way, the result in terms of depth of field will be the same. Because if you move close with a 75mm, you get something more tightly cropped than a passport photo, which is seldom applicable for a portrait).
With the 50mm 7artisan you may move really close to the subject and get a very narrow depth of field and thus a dreamy look you cannot get with any other lens.
In a recent talk with master lens designer Peter Karbe of Leica Camera AG, I mentioned that I like how the 50mm Noctilux balances between perfection and rock’n’roll: With the Noctilux you are walking on a razor-thin edge of what it is possible to do. The result is daring and artistic - some would say dreamy – images, which still possess very high quality.
The 75mm Noctilux is designed toward image perfection, which you accomplish by excellent design and control of everything. The result is a lens that has – yes – paper-thin focus, but at the same time has everything else under control. Even the bokeh is so silky smooth that you will find few surprises in it.
The surprising reflections of light going through the 50mm Noctilux are what make it exciting; because in the end the light rays meet in the right place and make up the extreme details and life-like details where the lens focuses. The rest is pure Star Wars and rock’n’roll.
Other lenses like the Canon 0.95 ($3,000 second-hand) and the Nikon f/1.2 ($750), and the Canon 75mm f/1.2 for that matter, have the light rays going here and there, and it’s all awesome, but the light rays never meet in the focus to form up the clarity that the 50mm Noctilux miraculously performs.
The focus of Leica Camera AG, and Peter Karbe is perfection, presently shown in the Leica SL lenses that are all designed to be large enough constructions to hold optical elements that can out-perform the resolution and clarity of everything and everybody else (I’ll get more into that later).
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For the most part, Leica M lenses have historically been about making small, compact lenses that perform miraculous perfection, with built-in personality. Controlled imperfections that we would mostly sum up in one expressive word: “Soul”.
The 7artisans lens has soul, without any fingerprint or signature that refers back to Mandler or any other Leica lens type of design. It has something that is soul, and is its own and hence something unique for that lens. And this is what makes it worth owning and using.
The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 creates the crazy bokeh that reminds of the legendary portrait lens, the Thambar, but this lens actually gets the face in focus. With the Thambar, that's the problem: It worked well on film, which it was made for back in the 1920's, but with today's digital sensors where you see every detail, you need some of the image to be sharp.
7artisans 50mm f/1.1: Strange bokeh with razor-sharp edges
One of the things the 7artisans has, that is a no-no in today’s lens design (which all aim towards silky smooth bokeh), is unexplainably sharp lines in the out-of-focus background. It’s either something you will find cute and exciting, or something that annoys you.
The 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 has a very intersting way of handling highlights, as in high-contrast and over-exposed areas. Rather than disclosing in full detail that the photographer tried to compose a photograph with too high contrast, it blesses it all with a heavenly glow.
The way a lens handles light is - in my opinion - the most intersting sign how a lens works as an artistic tool. The closer it operates on the edge of the impossible, the better. Lenses that can't handle light aren't intersting (as in plastic lenses, the ones on smartphones). And lenses that handles it without surprises aren't either (as in f/2.8 standard lenses).
The 50mm Noctilux f/1.0 and Noctilux f/0.95 is legendary lenses because they balance on the edge and deliver both image quality and image surprise. .
But ... the 7artisan 50mm f/1.1 has something unique here - something the 50mm Noctilux doesn't have.
Handling of light is always the intersting thing about any lens and what gives it's the look or soul of a lens. A rock'n'roll lens is one that has a blessed glow in unexpected places, a good long Star Wars-worthy flare, strange and chilling sparkles in the bokeh, or odd internal reflections that makes the image look special.
What makes the Leica Noctilux
the King of the Night and everything else
The Noctilux is legendary, and a masterpiece. It has straight lines, it has incredibly lively details, excellent color control, extreme handling of light even when you shoot against strong light sources (meaning that a hair stays a hair and there is no overflow of light from the strong light behind which would erase the hair and other edges with a less well-designed lens).
No other lens exists today that does what the Noctilux does. Canon, Nikon nobody has been able to make a wide open lens that performs this well in every regard.
It takes no skill to take a well-performing f/2.0 lens and open it up to f/0.95 so that everything becomes blurry and out of control; light flows everywhere and milks out the image, the details and the colors. But to open up a lens to f/0.95 and retain the details, the contrast, the colors and the overall clarity, that’s the art of the Noctilux, and that’s what you pay for. That it can also withstand a few drops on the floor and still perform with excellent and exact focus (despite the paper thin focus tolerance), well, that’s just part of the overall philosophy of perfection.
Launched by seven photography enthusiasts in March 2016, Shenzhen 7artisans Photoelectric Technology Co., Ltd. is a lens manufacturer in Shenzhen, China that focus on producing new compact camera lenses worldwide.
7artisans make lenses that fits Leica, Sony, Canon, Fujifilm, Panasonic and Olympus, such as 35mm f/1.2, 7.5mm f2.8, 12mm f/2.8, 25mm f/1.8, 35mm f/2.0, 50mmf/1.8, 55mm f/1.4 and the 50mm f/1.1.
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The strange and lovely
imperfections of the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1
Most of the time ... the 7artisans perform as a 50mm f/1.1 lens should. Andf then it has the lovely imperfections you wonder what caused. Clerly there is not the same control of things as in the Leica 50mm Noctilux-M ASPH f/0.95. And that is why the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 may live well and sound in the same family as the Noctilux. Some days you want rock'n'roll, other days you want more conntrol and perfection.
How is the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 different
than the Leitz Noctilux-M f/1.2?
They're close in f-stop, and they're also close in their imperfections that create a dreamy and often unpredictable artistic look. the very quality I like in the 7artisans lens in this day and age where so much research and technology try to accompolish perfection.
They're very different in price in that the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 sells new for $396.00 while the original Leitz Noctilux 50mm f/1.2 sells second-hand for $30,000 as a rare collectors item, and the new re-make of the classic (2021) is $8,000.
In terms of optical philosophy and optical performance, they're different. They have the depth-of-field almost in common, and they have the often surprising result of the bokeh in common.
The Noctilux is a 1966 design that tried it's best with the technology of that time, and designed at Leitz Canada under Dr. Mandler. As such it accomplishes the impossible with as much control as possible.
The 7artisans I don't know how they developed. I'm still unable to phantom how it is possible to produce a lens for only $396.00 in retail. I would guess they just cut some glass in the Sonnar design tradition (which is a Zeiss design notable for its relatively light weight, simple design and fast aperture) and put the thing together as best they could.
In the Leitz 50mm Noctilux-M f/1.2 you get a very high standard in lens design, as precise and excellent as it was possible to perform it in 1966 where much was hand-grinded and glass for light-srong lensese had to be invented from scratch.
In the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 you get a machine-produced lens developed as simple and economical as possible, leaning on all the history of low-light optics of the last 50 years.
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7artisans 50mm f/1.1 lens review: Conclusion
Yes, you will like the 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 ... and it will keep you dreaming of the real Noctilux once you’ve fallen in love with its bokeh, its unreal dreamy look and the possibility of using its extremely selective focus. So get one, and then start saving up for the real Noctilux, because that’s the way it will go. The 7artisan might be the poor man’s Noctilux, but nobody wants to stay poor forever.
To quote Bob Dylan rather freely, from his song "Most of the Time" , this summs up how the 7artisans performs as a lens and what it means to be a true rock'n'roll lens:
Most of the time
I'm clear focused all around
Most of the time
I can keep both feet on the ground
I can follow the path
I can't make it all match up I ain't afraid of confusion
Most of the time I'm halfway content Most of the time I know exactly where it all went And I don't pretend I don't even care
I hope you enjoyed this article on the low light lens, 7artisans 50mm f/1.1 for Leica M. More to come. Sign up for my free newsletter below here to stay in the know on new articles on lenses, photography and cameras.
As always, feel free to e-mail me with ideas, comments, querstions and advice.
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I am in constant orbit teaching
Leica and photography workshops.
Most people prefer to explore a
new place when doing my workshop.
30% of my students are women.
35% of my students dotwo or more workshops.
95% are Leica users.
Age range is from 15 to 87 years
with the majority in the 30-55 range.
Skill level ranges from two weeks
to a lifetime of experience.
97% use a digital camera.
100% of my workshop graduates photograph more after a workshop.
