This kit is a great creative pick-me-up. It was a bit of a strange feeling when I first tried these lenses. I had just tested dozens of high quality, pro-grade lens that give near-perfect results. Then, I tried these and couldn’t believe we had bought them. After about 20 minutes of playing around and a few reminders to stop judging them like the lenses I had tested over the past few hours, I was hooked. I’ll give you guys a bit of a breakdown on the lenses.

The 35mm f1.7 equates to a fun little 70mm-equivalent toy lens. The aperture blades on this lens are pretty strange. Although the specs say it’s an f1.7, take it with a grain of salt. Each copy of this lens we have opens up to a different aperture at it’s widest. So don’t rent this kit and get upset because the lens doesn’t go all the way to f1.7. We are aware of this. Okay, now this lens does not have corner sharpness. If you stop down to f16, you still won’t get it. Just for fun, you should look at the aperture blades while stopped down. You’ll never see another lens that can pull off a rectangular f16! Just don’t stop down too far, cause the aperture actually completely closes.

The 26mm f1.4 gives a very interesting 52mm-equivalent normal range lens. This might be the most fun lens I’ve played with in a while. The bokeh this lens gives you is crazy! It’s circular, dream-like blur makes backgrounds appear to spin. It’s definitely more of a specialty effect, but I loved it. Wide open is a tad hazy, but if you stop down just a bit, you get some beautiful images. It does vignette, so your corners will be dark. If you stop down, you actually start to see the aperture blades, so watch out for that. There’s no corner sharpness and anything outside of the center will appear as a swirly blur. Sounds awesome, right!

The 12mm f1.6 HyperPrime, compared to the other two lenses, is like a Ferrari. It’s solid build and function make it a great fast aperture wide-angle lens. At f1.6, you got some haze, but it sharpens up as you stop down. The stepless aperture ring and smooth manual focus ring make for a video shooters dream lens. I like this lens in this kit because it gives you a wide-angle lens that you won’t spend the whole time frustrated because the corners aren’t crazy smeared or completely vignetted. You can shoot without reservations, and when you want the “artsy” look, slap one of the other two lenses on.

Overall, this lens kit is great for trying something new. It works great for video work, as well as stills. One word of warning, and I can’t stress this enough. If you fall into the category of a pixel-peeper (I’m guilty of this at times as well), you cannot take that approach to what you get with this kit. It’s meant to be used for fun results. Don’t try to use these as your main lenses to shoot an entire wedding with. Or if you do, make sure your client is okay with artsy. However, you may want at least one normal lens for group pictures!