TTartisan 27mm f2.8 AF
Its an odd lens this, cheap, full metal construction and with auto focus. Gone are the days a sub £200 3rd party (really really 3rd party) lens was manual focus only, this little lens has AF, but is it really worth it?
TTArtisan 27mm on the sony a6700
Lets start with the good, at £130-£160 theres very little to complain about that cant be explained with… Yeah but its a cheap lens. You dont have to wait long to find those moments (see below) but they’re mostly forgivable.
And for that £160 what you get is pretty compelling, a 0.37m minimum focusing distance lets you get pretty close for those street shots without completely losing the ability to auto focus, and at 28mm we are talking about one of the classic street focal lengths.
Build
The build quality feels, being all metal, like it should be excellent, but it’s not really as good as it seems on first glance, the Aperture ring feels especially egregious, aesthetically it’s nicely designed, a nice full metal construction with cut and coloured numbers around the ring with a raised and ridged section at either end to make it easier to turn, but while this is a clicked ring (with no option to de-click, its £130-160 what did you expect?) the clicks are so feeble as to almost not exist. The sony 40mm has a solid Clunk when putting it into the A aperture setting to let the camera choose, and even with that its easily knocked out of A, but the 27mm is MUCH, MUCH worse, the clicks are so loose you can often find yourself suddenly shooting at f16.
In terms of size and construction this is a fully metal lens
Auto Focus
The focus ring also feels well designed, but badly constructed, while well dampened the ring itself wobbles and makes you wonder how long before the focus ring comes off all together, lucky then that this lens has AF.
The AF is there and it does work, albeit slower than any of the Tamron or Sigma lenses and its significantly slower than the SONY lenses, but when it works it works well enough and accurately, but it does suffer from completely giving up on focusing at times seemingly for no reason and often even when there’s distinct contrast in the target of the focus point.
Images
Image quality wise, the images are clean, sharp and pleasant to look at, as you’d expect for such a cheap lens, its a little softer in the corners but not overly so, and there’s a very distinct vignette around the edges of the image, though much of that can be dealt with using the Lightroom profiles available from the TTartisan homepage.
This profile is however a bit of a weird one, installing the profile is easy enough but regardless of what version of the profile you install they all put themselves in the Fujifilm profile directory, neither adding the profile to its own TTartisan directory nor the SONY directory. Instead every time you edit images from this lens you have to go hunting for its profile in the Fujifilm dir. Its good that they’ve done one, but you do wish theyd just spent the extra time to make the system feel a little more professional.
Conclusions
For what it is the lens is fine, and you can get good shots from it, its one of the few 28mm…ish lenses on the sony APS-C platform, and its very fun to use, but there are caveats. The focus is sometimes sluggish and the build quality is hit and miss but if you can accept the flaws, and like the images it creates then this focal length is perfect for budding street photographers and fun to use, and at this price there really is no reason not to give it a try.
