Kamlan 50mm F/1.1 Mark 2 initial impressions
I got the Fuji X-T3 camera last Thanksgiving and using its metal kit lens 18–55 F/2.8 to F/4 has been a blast, but I’m missing a fast lens especially at the longer focal lengths. While the low light performance of the X-T3 sensor has been great, it would be nice to have low ISO performance in low light while being able to use a fast shutter for both stills and video.
Fast lenses are generally very expensive but I’ve been reading good things about the Kamlan 50mm F/1.1 Mark 2. It’s known as a “Bokeh King” but Bokeh is as much a limitation as it is a feature because fast lenses lose depth-of-field. Things get blurry sooner when you move closer or further from the focus zone. It can be great for artistic purposes because it can blur the background and isolate your subject, but sometimes you can’t get enough of the subject in focus unless they are very far away from you.
The more important reason I wanted it was to achieve low ISO and low noise performance. An F/1.1 lens has a lens aperture that is 3.64 times greater diameter than my Fuji Kit lens of F/4 at 50mm zoom. That means 13.22 times the light capture area and 13.22 times more light. So instead of being forced to shoot at ISO 12500, I can shoot at ISO 945 which is leaps and bounds better in low noise performance. To confirm this theory, I took some indoor test shots.
View it full screen at 1000 by 1000 pixels to see the full difference, which is a very significant improvement in noise performance using the Kamlan 50mm F/1.1 Mark 2 lens.
Here are the full resolution processed JPEGs.
The F/4 lens resulted in so much noise that I had to resort to 93% compression quality to get the JPEG under the 25 MB image size limit for Medium. The Kamlan image was compressed at 100% JPEG quality and was less than 22 MB despite being a slightly larger image because it didn’t use Lens Profile processing in Capture One.
There are more technical reviews of the Kamlan 50mm F/1.1 Mark 2 lens like this one from Christopher Frost Photography. He analyzes things like lens sharpness, distortion, chromatic aberration, and vignetting.
While the Kamlan isn’t going to perform as well as a $949 Sigma 50mm 1.4 Art, it comes close enough in quality at $250 on Amazon and it’s still faster. But it seems the real limitation to image quality in most indoor no-flash pictures or videos is ISO performance. The lower you can push the ISO with a faster lens, the better your image quality.
Other notes on the Kamlan 50mm F/1.1 Mark 2 is that it’s big and heavy with solid metal construction. It can be challenging to manually focus pictures or videos though Focus Peaking in the Fuji X-T3 helps a lot. I will probably need to get a nice 1080P 7" monitor for my X-T3 to make manual focusing easier and more precise.
