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Review: Pergear 35mm f1.6
A comprehensive review of the Pergear 35mm f1.6 lens for Fujifilm X mount cameras.
Pergear 35mm f1.6 lens for Fuji X mount. A handy standard-view lens in a tiny package.
What's in the box?
The lens comes packaged in a box that is clearly notes that the contents should be, indeed, a lens. Inside that box is the lens, a cheap rear cap, an even cheaper front pinch cap and a coarse lens bag. Not bagging on Pergear too much, the lens is very affordably priced at $70, but I would personally have traded the cheap lens bag for a more robust and higher quality front pinch cap personally.
Build quality
The overall build quality is just barely in the good category. While the lens is constructed of metal and glass, other similarly priced offerings from Chinese lens makers like Meike outdo this lens. The focus and aperture rings spin smoothly with enough damping to not be problematic. The aperture ring is clickless and smooth, which is probably my only real gripe with the lens overall. I like clicks. Smooth apertures make me sad and oftentimes confused, leaving me constantly double checking the aperture setting to ensure its in the position that I want it to be in before taking a shot. The lens markings seem to be painted on, so time will tell how well they hold up. The markings are at least crisp and clean. It mounts up smoothly to the Fuji X-mount on my camera, and locks into place with an adequately low amount of slop.
Lens performance and image quality
The lens is interesting. The handling is great, as this is tiny compared to the autofocus lenses. The only detrimental aspect of handling is the aforementioned clickless aperture ring, and even that is tolerable after you get used to it.
Here's where this little beast gets interesting. The center sharpness is alright wide open and gets better as you stop down. The edge sharpness never really feels amazing, but does improve as you close the aperture. This is definitely not a landscape lens, and you probably wouldn't want to use it in any application where you're shooting flat surfaces head on. However, as a general purpose lens shooting subjects at a close to standard field of view (52.5mm full-frame equivalent on the Fuji systems) it truly is a nice lens. Center sharpness, as mentioned, is adequate to good as you stop down, and if you stick to shooting subjects with a shallow depth of field this lens can be a blast to use and produces quite nice images.
The lens out of focus area is smooth in most situations wide open, and has a nice characteristic stopped down with its 8 aperture blades. The lens does have some chromatic aberrations, but nothing insurmountably bad that can't either be dealt with in post.
Check out some of my quick test shots with the lens
Final thoughts
The lens doesn't come with fancy box candy, which is fine. The lens has some "poor" optical quality in some use cases. The lens only barely feels good in the physical build quality department. The Pergear 35mm f1.6 lens is an absolute blast to use, and will stay in my camera bag (thanks in large part to its small size) for those use cases of: when I need a standard field of view AND want a fairly large aperture AND am doing subject photography. In this price range with that use case in mind this lens absolutely gets my recommendation and will find a place in my camera bag for the time being.
Written on Sunday, 6 December 2020, by Aaron Brown. Last edited on
