7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF (Z Mount) Review

As part of my transition from Sony to Nikon for my primary digital camera I am going to be testing a few more lenses from the budget end of the market. The next one the list is this, the surprisingly interesting 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF.

I have mentioned a few times on this website that I have a funny relationship with 35mm lenses. I have a bit of a poor mindset toward them that makes me think I can’t get on with the focal length. It’s that old not wide enough, but also not long enough dilemma. I feel like I’m slightly more impacted as I generally find myself finding more joy with even an 85mm than a 50. With that said, pretty much every time I pick up a 35mm lens I am reminded of the fact that my bias is actually pretty much a load of nonsense, as when I start shooting I find it a very easy field of view to make work for me. It’s also a pretty great second lens to have for the Nikon Z system – as having shot with it for a little while, I have pretty much concluded that I could probably shoot just 35 and 85 for my hobby and rarely feel like I’m in need of anything else. The question I have found myself asking though, is if this is quite the right 35mm lens for me long term…?

7Artisans actually got in touch with me to ask about trying this lens at pretty much the perfect moment. I was literally days away from buying the Nikon Zf when I had an email land in my inbox asking me if I would be interested in reviewing it. I’d already spoken to Viltrox about the 85 1.8, so this seemed like the perfect chance to try something wider on the system. With 35mm being a lesser priority for me, a more budget end of the market lens seems appropriate too.

7Artisans AF lenses

7Artisans are relatively new to the autofocus lens game. I actually tested their first, the 50mm 1.8 (review here) and it was pretty obvious at the time that this was their first foray into AF lenses. It wasn’t like it was riddled with issues, but it was the preproduction lens I received felt like was still something of a work in progress. This, I believe, is their 6th AF lens. They have over 100 lenses on the market today, so that’s still a small proportion compared to their manual focus offerings, but it’s clear they are now pushing into the AF market place at pace, and are now getting things a lot more right.

7Artisans 35mm 1.8 Build quality

What was immediately clear taking the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF out of the box was that they are doing something right when it comes to quality control. That is to say, unlike the 50mm which came to me with a few obvious issues, the 35mm was exactly as I would hope. The aperture control worked to select the aperture I set it to, the dial wasn’t not too stiff or loose and the hood and caps all fit properly. Not too much to ask, but those were issues I had with the 50mm.

Those first experiences of the 50 left me feeling a little nervous about what I might receive, but actually taking the 35mm out of the box I was very pleasantly surprised. I talked in my Viltrox 85mm 1.8 review about what I decided was a scale of lens quality where they don’t feel well made at one end, and feel very much well made at the other. I mentioned that the Viltrox feels very well made and alluded to the fact the 7Artisans 50mm hadn’t. Well, as is probably clear from the previous paragraph, this new 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF is definitely further toward the better made end of the scale than the 50mm. But, it’s fair to say it doesn’t quite have the solidity of the Viltrox which I claimed would probably be indistinguishable from a 1st party lens were it not to have the logo on the side. I can’t honestly say the same about this 7Artisans lens, but what is impressive is that it feels a lot closer to the likes of my Samyang 75mm than it does to the 50mm I reviewed before. There is a possibility that some of this is down to the simple fact that everything worked when I got it out of the box, but I could also swear that overall it just feels slightly more solid.

The body of the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 is made of metal, as it the mount, and indeed focus grip. There don’t appear to be much in the way of weather sealing. As I’ve said, the hood and caps are a nice fit. The focus control is quite smooth as is the unclicked aperture control. Though it does have a nice click between the aperture settings and A mode.

One slight oddity is the printed design on the lens’s aperture settings. There are two lines between each labelled setting on the lens. It’s not unusual two have 3rd stops available on lenses, and as far as I can see these 3rd stops are all available and as expected between each full stop setting. What is odd is the two little lines between f/1.8 and f/2 as setting the camera to either of these does nothing. There are no 3rd stops between 1.8 and 2.0 so having lines that don’t signify anything or indeed do anything when you set the lens to them just seems a little odd to me.

Reservations about longevity

Being a budget lens made by a budget lens brand, I also have some reservations about the lens’s potential longevity. Will this 7Artisans 35mm AF lens still be working in years to come? As I have talked about in other reviews of budget lenses, it’s very hard to say. Of course, the advantage here is that it doesn’t cost much in the first place, so at least on an individual investment level it might not matter as much. Though I say that with acknowledgment that in this day and age, adding to e-waste should probably be also taken into account. We live in a throwaway world, and cheaper, easier to throw away stuff doesn’t help that if it breaks…

Other features

As mentioned, there’s a manual aperture control on the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8. I have started to find a lot of favour in having these controls on modern lenses, so I definitely appreciate it here. There’s also an AF/MF switch, useful to some but redundant to me as I don’t use these switches due to the way I otherwise have the camera set up. Finally, there’s also an fn button. This is set to AE-L as standard which I don’t really use, and am yet to engage with the idea of setting it to something else, but it feels like a nice-to-have and I bet is something a lot of people will benefit from.

7Artisans 35mm 1.8 size

I think possibly the biggest compromise the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 imposes on its users is its size. We have the Sony 35mm 1.8 at work, a lens that trumps this lens in pretty much every respect, including its size. It’s obviously possible to make a small good quality 35mm 1.8, but 7Artisans have definitely not taken that route here – possibly for reasons of cost. For me personally, this has been a big factor. Were I the sort to carry a bigger camera bag, it wouldn’t be an issue, but as someone who carries only a small bag, I’ve found it difficult to justify taking this lens out as a second lens to the 85mm lenses I have been otherwise shooting recently. As such, I’ve largely just committed to shooting just this lens when I go out with it. Not really a massive deal as someone who likes to just go out with one lens, but it has definitely meant it’s just stayed at home instead of coming out with me as a second option on a couple of occasions I have chosen the 85 instead.

Autofocus

Of course, being an autofocus lens, probably one of the most important aspects of judging this lens is going to be how well the AF performs. The short answer is that’s it’s pretty good, though it’s not perfect, and is definitely not quite is good as the Viltrox 85mm 1.8.

With that said, mounted on the Zf – which I believe is probably giving it a bit of a leg up – it still managed to keep up with my kid on her bike in pretty low light shooting situations. Though, focus accuracy wasn’t really my key measure of success in that situation as I was going for a slightly motion-blurred look anyway… but it did surprise me how well it worked nonetheless.

Where I have found it to not be totally reliable is when focusing at the closest focus distances. As I will get to, I think there’s an image quality issue at play a little here too, but especially in lower light, it just seems to struggle a bit to grab perfect focus when using the eye-AF.

In fact, this hasn’t been totally limited to low light – I’ve found it a factor when both me and my subject matter have been moving a bit. It just seems to lack an overall ability to grasp perfect focus every time. With that said, it’s not like every image is impacted, just slightly more than I’d be perfectly comfortable with if I was going to be using the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 either a lot in lower light or for particularly active subject matter with the lens wide open. For normal day-to-day snaps where I have been more static or slightly more stopped down, I’ve found it to work pretty much perfectly. It is after all a budget lens from the very much budget end of the market, so expecting more would probably be a bit of a fool’s errand. For the price point it sits at, I would be happy with what this lens is capable of here.

Autofocus noise

One downfall I have found when it comes to the AF is that it’s a little noisy. I have my Zf set up so the AF is activated when a separate button to the shutter button is pressed. I’ll talk about this in another article about the camera at some point, but the benefit of this is that it allows me to have the camera set to AF-C all the time. As a result, when I activate the AF and my subject is moving slightly, the AF in the lens can end up moving quite a lot, and with it, the lens makes quite a bit of noise. Ok, we aren’t talking 90s lens AF noise here, it’s basically just a bit of a clicking noise, but it’s still probably not suitable for video. Even Norah pointed it out asking my why the camera was making a weird noise when I was taking this photo:

Image quality

I must start by saying that I expected the 7Artisans to have a sort of pretty good, but pretty boring optical character. That is to say, I expected it to be sharp enough, but not exceptional, and then to otherwise be pretty impressive without necessarily bringing anything interesting to the table. Actually I’ve found myself really quite enjoying the way this lens renders.

Sharpness

As mentioned above, I don’t always find my wide open close-up shots to be perfectly sharp. I think some of this is down to the AF not quite hitting the mark, but I also think the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 just renders quite gently wide open when close up. With that said, it’s not like photos look soft, there’s a decent amount of clarity and contrast to give a good impression of sharpness, just when you pixel-peep it’s sometimes difficult to pinpoint the exact plain of focus. For close up portraits, I really like this as the lack of bite to the detail just feels a little more flattering when taking photos of people.

With that said, at mid to further distances, I’ve found it to perform really quite well in terms of sharpness, even when shot wide open. In this image for example you can see that it’s even acceptably sharp into the corners – though obviously the centre is lost to the shallow depth of field.

Bokeh

Where I think things get really interesting with the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 are in the transition zones and out of focus areas. If you have a look at this image of Norah and look closely at her hair you can see how there’s some glow (click through to flickr and zoom in if you can’t see it here).

What’s in focus melts away really nicely to out of focus, and it does so quite quickly too. Depth of field seems quite shallow and the rendering of the bokeh is really quite lovely too. In my recent Viltrox 85mm 1.8 review I complained that the bokeh was almost too perfect, like it lacked character and charm. I acknowledged that this is probably what people want from modern lens rendering, but to me it was a little 2D. This is less the case with the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8, which by comparison has much more character to the bokeh. For a start, there just feels like there’s more depth to the out of focus. A part of this is of course that a 35mm lens won’t knock a background quite as out of focus as an 85mm, so of course there’s more detail in the out of focus areas. But what is there also isn’t rendered quite as objectively perfectly. Sometimes I find there’s a little bit of a swirl as you can slightly see here:

What you can also see there is given a complex background is that whilst it does quite a nice job of smoothing and distracting busyness to the background, it does so without also totally flattening the background into a totally amorphous 2D plain of out of focus. The glow I see in the transition zones, also seems apparent in the wider out of focus rendering too. The result of all of this is images like this one:

The whole image

In that above image, you can see Norah nicely in focus, but the nice shallow depth of field and glowing nature to the transitions and bokeh create a really lovely overall rendering. Though the resolution might not be perfect wide open, the contrast and clarity it renders make up for it that when combined with how it renders the bokeh make for images at mid distances that have really nice subject separation pop like in this image:

In short, whilst not perfect, the overall images the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 create when shot at 1.8 have a really quite lovely look to them that has encouraged me to use the lens wide open more than I might normally choose to do so.

Flare

There’s also some character to the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 when it comes to flare. It’s certainly not perfect at controlling stray light. For example, in this shot the light from just outside of the frame has certainly made its presence known.

But whilst that streakiness might rear it’s head occasionally, I haven’t found the image to veil out too much. The contrast seems to hold quite nicely even when shooting directly into the sun.

Vignetting

I’ve also noticed quite a bit of vignetting that can still be seen when stopped down a bit. As if I need to say it again though, this doesn’t bother me – I prefer a lens with vignetting as it saves me adding it in post.

Distortion and other aberrations

As you can also see in the image of the container above, the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF also exhibits a bit of pincushion distortion. This might be something of concern for some with a wider focal length like this. It doesn’t particularly impact me and my hobby photography, but I thought it definitely worth pointing out.

I haven’t really noticed much in the way of colour aberrations at all – I thought this was quite impressive actually. Very little colour fringing even in high contrast edges of foliage etc.

Overall character within my photography

As mentioned, I’ve found myself shooting this lens wide open way more than stopped down. I just find the slight softness at closer distances combined with the shallow depth of field and higher contrast and clarity to what’s in focus and the overall bokeh rendering to create really lovely looking images. Add in a bit of vignetting and the overall images just look really quite aesthetically pleasing to me.

Of course, this is me leaning into what I see as this lens’s most characterful features to its image rendering. Stop down a bit and it actually renders a lot more objectively conventionally.

This is, of course, pretty much what’s to be expected from lenses at the budget end of the spectrum these days. Almost all modern lenses are capable of rendering pretty strongly when stopped down, what happens when shot wider open is where budget lenses can fall apart a little. What I find particularly pleasing is just how the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 falls apart. It’s not a disaster objectively, and subjectively, for me personally, it really suits my personal tastes!

More photos

More photos here

Final thoughts on the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8

I have definitely been pleasantly surprised by the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 AF lens on my Nikon Zf. There’s definitely pros and cons here – as you might and should expect from a budget lens. But, for me personally, the only serious con its size. It has absolutely made me realise that I need a smaller 35mm if I’m going to have one as a second lens to my 85mm. For some, the AF noise will also be a factor, as might the AF performance which isn’t quite perfect. Reservations about longevity might also factor into the buying decision for some here – though thanks to it being so cheap, if it did break, I guess I would be less bothered…

Where some people might also quibble is with the wide open rendering. The slight softness (close up) and not quite perfect bokeh might put some people off going for a budget lens like this, but for me the character of the lens when shot wide open has actually made me shoot it more like this than stopped down. It’s no conventionally/objectively perfect lens for sure, but the way it renders is just on the right side of aesthetically pleasing for me which has endeared me to it in a way that I definitely wasn’t expecting!

In short, mostly thanks to its larger size, it’s not the perfect 35mm lens for me and my Nikon Zf as I would definitely struggle to carry it as a second lens to my favoured longer (85mm) lens choice, but for what it is, when I have been happy to engage with the idea of shooting just a 35mm lens, I have really enjoyed the 7Artisans 35mm 1.8 – I just love some of the images it has allowed to capture when shooting it wide open. And for me, having a lens that allows me a certain characteristic charm pretty much overrides most other factors. I just need a more everyday-carry type 35mm lens now!

You can but the lens on the 7Artisans website here (this is a referral link, so I get a bit of cash to support 35mmc if you buy from there)
Amazon link here too

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