Astrhori 18mm f/8 Pancake Shift lens review

A pancake size AND a shift feature? Neat!
Find it here (Amazon affiliate link - thanks for the support!):
geni.us/Astrhori18
All pictures taken by me on Sony a7R III and Sony a5100 cameras.
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Sigma 50mm f/1.4 'Art': geni.us/Sigma50mm14Art
Canon RF 35mm f/1.8 IS STM: geni.us/CanonRF35mm18Macro
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Music:
'Opportunity Walks', Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
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[@ikoyDaPnoy]

Tip: If you have an FF camera, shoot in crop mode. You'll have a cheqp Tilt-shift 27mm f/12 equivalent for landscape and architecture. I'm using the Sony a7cR w/ 62 MP which still gives me 26 MP in crop mode.

[@_benjimouse_]

Would have been cool to see the sharpness of the far corners when shifted. I gave up using my laowa shift macro's shift function because althou it covered FF the IQ degradation was just too much to bear.

[@papel_pe]

If I had some money just laying around would love to try out this lens

[@montazownianr1]

Keep your money, you will need them later...

[@paultaylor5513]

Everyone needs money later. But for now you might as well get this lens?

[@d30gaijin]

I find the Astrhori 18mm f/8 makes a great outdoors snapshot lens on APS-C cameras (Sony A6100 in my case) producing sharp images with the added bonus of the shift capability. Well worth the US$120 in my opinion.

[@ramongutierrez8249]

was waiting for this review! thanks! :D

[@watch4joygroup441]

Great review. Thank you

[@BemCorrido]

Thanks I was looking for this one!

[@edisonlucasfotografia]

Bro! I'm a really fan of your videos, it helps a lot and because of you me and a lot of photography friends had been chosing the right lenses and not spendind badly!!! Could I ask you or send a tip? Can you put your microphone a little bit far from your mouth? It gets a lot of the moist clicks of yout tongue (like me and a lot of friends that have misophonia)

[@TheCruisinCrew]

Interesting lens for sure!

[@nvztsnl]

looks like usefull for bnw abstract and landscape photography

[@blazerbarrel2]

Nice video . Again a special purpose lens , looks like a good simple wide lens for the apcs format , i like the shift feature for landscape , and architecture .

[@paulmcwilliams8641]

Recently I photographed a beautiful Norfolk church called St Michael the Archangel using my Tamron 20 - 40 on my Sony a7Cii and I was only just able to do enough lens correction to satisfactorily straighten up the image without cropping part of the church out. To improve things I went back and tried a panorama sequence, which unfortunately produced a hump backed church. With the Astrhori mounted on my Sony 6700 and the focus set to the hyperfocal distace of about 3.3 metres, I took 11 shots shifting the lens vertically at every increment point. Just a + 1 or 2 up was enough to staighten up the converging verticals and I could not detect any distortion once I tweaked the raw image in Affinity Photo. I found the image to be very much on the warm side and had to adjust the white balance and tint accordingly. In the end though it was a more pleasing result for me than the full frame rig produced. I'm very pleased with it.

[@BemCorrido]

Thanks

[@christopherfrost]

Thanks!

[@pandalavalamp]

Surprised you haven't done a review of Sony Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 35/2,8 ZA yet, will there be one in the near future? Would love to see how it compares to the other 35mm full frame lenses you've tested so far

[@maxwiltshire6159]

Chris, do you know whether this will be coming for any other mounts? I would love it if they released this for Fuji - hopefully they are just starting with Sony and will bring it to other mounts later.

[@pietarivuola]

Available for Canon RF, Leica L and Nikon Z mounts on Pergear's website. No mention of Fuji X though...

[@Archontasil]

In apsc does the edge show up during shift?

[@Durio_zibethinus]

Oh no, this lens is a cute one 😅 Thanks for your video as usual, Chris..

[@christofferlindvall4128]

Is this lens available for Fujifilm XF?

[@drbeardo6960]

Nice review Chris Thanks Canon FL 50mm f1.2 vs Meike 50mm f1.2 Which one is better.?

[@christopherfrost]

Probably the Canon

[@sethmoyer]

I have the FD 55mm f/1.2 SSC non-aspherical and it's a fantastic lens. It's very dreamy when wide open and sharpness improves as you stop down. By f/2.8 and f/4 it's absolutely razor sharp. I use it on my EOS RP with an adapter.

[@Twobarpsi]

A nice little lens. I like the photos it takes!

[@no15minutecities]

no

[@jamescaldwell5]

I love how precise your image sharpness tests are. What is the size of the chart you take a picture of for this test? (The one you use for center vs edge sharpness measurement). The distance from the camera must change depending on the focal length of the lens. As you always demonstrate, most lenses suffer at minimum focus, do you think most lenses have a focal length that they perform best at? Having recently purchased the Laowa 90mm f2.8 macro, I’m fascinated by how it does well at virtually any focal length. It’s only possible fault being it’s my slowest prime lens, however at 90mm you still get loads of bokeh if your portrait subject is filling the frame.

[@flikflak24]

Well we have seen a lot more focus breathing on way more expensive lenses then this one so personally I wouldn't mind the amount it have with that low prices

[@lorenzogattaldo3764]

With this copy of the lens, the right side of the image looks far worse than the left side shown in detail during the test (02:32)

[@benjamindover4337]

Looks like a bargain for real estate photographers.

[@no15minutecities]

Not really.....not wide enough, too soft in the corners and a very SLOW lens!! Wake up.

[@RSKNPOL]

@@no15minutecities what aperture U using for real estate?

[@geofflongford2008]

Lens 95% on f11 for my work and 16-35 go to lens. A proper Tilt shift like canon 17mm is the way to go. The least amount of post production is what you want.

[@Askaly]

Impressive sharpness for the price, but limited use cases.

[@jihugo]

Not saying you mean it but introducing many lens makers with "Chinese manufacturer" may sound a little blunt to some.

[@drbeardo6960]

1🎉

[@skazhenyj]

What needs to be mentioned is that probably every copy is decentered to strongly decentered (I think this is the most important aspect of a wide angle lens, must be tested). Then it must be tested as a shift lens, with performance when shifted (which is terrible, and you get that huge distortion that makes this a pointless lens, since shift function is mostly used for architecture). I know it's a cheap lens, but there are too many things that aren't being covered here and some more in-depth reviews should be considered before buying this thing. Yeah, it's cheap, but why to throw the money away...

[@no15minutecities]

Pointless lens.