Funleader 18mm f/8 review

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Funleader 18mm f/8: A strange name for a strange lens. My guess is that the name is directly translated from Chinese. So what is it? It is a "body cap lens", a simple lens the size of the body cap. There are no mechanical moving parts at all: The focus is fixed, at the hyperfocal distance, and the aperture is also fixed at f/8. The picture shows what you get: A box with a small pouch, and the lens itself:

The lens is made from black aluminium, and from the rear you can see that the material is ribbed on the inside to avoid stray light:

Connected to the Nikon Z7 camera, you can see how tiny the lens is:

As the lens has a very short focal distance (ultra wide angle), and a small aperture, the depth of field is wide. According to the advertisement, everything from 0.8m to infinity should be in focus automatically.

Image quality

So are the images good? Is the lens more than just a fun novelty toy? Let's look at some examples:

In this picture, we clearly see that the vignetting is heavy (dark corners). Also, you can see that there is a speck of dust on the sensor on the right hand side. With the short focal length and small aperture, any dust is going to be very visible. In this case, using a simple rocket blower was enough to get rid of the dust from the sensor.

Looking at a 100% crop from the centre of the image, coming from the Nikon Z7, we see that the centre sharpness is quite good:

And from the lower left part of the image, the image quality is worse, but still not horrible:

In the lower extreme corner, the image quality is rather poor:

Conclusion

This lens is hard to place: Not cheap enough to be a toy, but not good enough to be truly useful. So it remains a somewhat steeply priced mediocre novelty lens.

Example images

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