No love for the Kamlan 15mm F/2.0

Rightsaidfred wrote:

Hi andrerav

andrerav wrote:

Please excuse the click bait title. But I can't seem to shake the feeling that this lens was never well received by the Fuji community. I literally can't find any photos made with it on Flickr,

I mean you know it; the lens does not transmit any Exif data. Don't know about the search functions on Flickr but If photographers enter the lens name manually, the names they enter will differ. Some certainly won't enter anything.

100% agree with that, but comparatively it seems to be less used since I can usually find at least a few photos if not a dedicated group when researching odd lenses.

and none of the renowned Youtubers have reviewed it. And I can understand why -- the competition is fierce, and the seemingly dated optic formula and manual operation certainly doesn't help.

But it has its charm, and I can certainly recommend it if you can't afford the Samyang/Rokinon 12mm MF

I think 12 mm vs and 15 mm in the fl makes too big a difference to see them as direct competitors. And is the price delta between the two that big?

Ah yes, when I wrote that the competition is fierce I had lenses like the Fuji 16mm F/2.8 in mind, for example. The Sammy 12mm MF is the only lens I could think of (of course not forgetting offerings from Brighting Star a.o) that is a fast wide angle manual focus. But you're absolutely right, the difference in focal length is significant in practice.

(hereby dubbed SY). It's actually very sharp, and the edges and corners are sharper than on the SY. The sun stars are much nicer as well.

Your sample photo shows that well. The performance in the corners is really good!

Definitely. It also has fairly low distortion. The photo I posted is not distortion corrected at all, in fact.

On the downside, the close focusing distance is abysmal, and basically not really usable for interesting up-close photos. Additionally, it has that bulbous front element that crushes any hopes of mounting a screw-on filter. And the front cap is probably the worst I have ever seen.

Anyway, enough about the lens. Here's a photo I took this evening here in Trondheim, Norway. I used the Kamlan 15mm F/2.0 @ F7 on my Fujifilm X-S10. Hope you like it!

I like it. The sunstars are also nice.

Thank you for your little review

Martin

Glad you liked it!