I’ve recently gotten back into photography by buying myself a Fujifilm X-E5. Since I previously shot a Canon 70D, I have no lenses for the new system and I’ve been shopping… aggressively. One thing that’s new and exciting since last I was seriously in the camera market is that the market for lenses has gotten REALLY competitive with Chinese budget options that are actually quite good! It used to be back in 2010 that maybe Tamron or Sigma made lenses for your mount, and if so, only the very newest and most expensive of those were any good at all, and they’d still have serious trade offs with much more expensive first-party glass. On the really cheap end, Rokinon and Samyang maybe made a couple manual lenses that were not as good as the first party options but at least MUCH cheaper.

Fast forward to 2026 and now, as long as the manufacturer of your mount doesn’t actively sue third party manufacturers (cough Canon RF cough) you’ve got ZILLIONS of bargain-basement manual options (TTArtisan, 7artisans, Meike, Brightin Star), some HIGH END manual options with electronic contacts for EXIF/metering (Voigtländer), bargain AF options (TTArtisan, 7Artisans), mid-tier AF options (Viltrox, Sigma, Tamron), and certainly high-end AF options (Sigma, Tamron, Viltrox). I hadn’t ever heard of Viltrox before shopping for this mount, but damn if they haven’t become a premium lens brand at a budget price near-overnight as far as my awareness goes. And TTArtisan/7Artisans are delivering incredible bang for the buck at the low end.

So all this to say, while shopping for some fast primes to spend low-dollars on for my new body, I realized quickly that the options were overwhelming. It’s actually kind of a problem: the Chinese consumer products industry is SO capable these days of releasing new products that the moment something unique and compelling arrives from one manufacturer, within weeks every other player has a direct, and usually competent answer to it, and they’re sort of just as quick to discontinue products that don’t immediately catch the market. It’s terribly difficult for the consumer ecosystem of Youtube reviewers and individual buyers to keep up!

In searching for a 35mm lens for my Fuji XF camera, I identified 12 options from 5 manufacturers all at the budget price point under about $200. That’s 12 highly competetive options for one very specific photographic niche!

So anyway, I’ve already gone on too long: This isn’t supposed to be a lens review, just a “here’s what I bought and here’s what I kept and why” cliffs notes. On with it.

The Contenders

In this case, I wanted to stick with autofocus lenses in the impulse-buy (for me) price point of sub-$200. There are similarly cheap manual lenses in here, but none of them are “premium” manual lenses with electronic interface. Plus, I’m no good at manual focus, yet. My Voigtländer 18mm Color Skopar is a delight, and for now I’d prefer to learn manual focus on that alone.

TTArtisan 35mm F1.8, $125: This lens has so much praise on Youtube for its sheer value that it was the first I bought, before I even realized there were so many options.

Viltrox 35mm F1.7, $180: I bought this one second, when I realized there was a “premium” option sneaking into the “budget” price bracket.

7Artisans 35mm F1.4, $144: Late in the game, I realized 7artisans had a 35mm AF option to compete, and it was even faster than the first two. This is actually a $170 lens, but alas, Amazon is all about pricing games, and I got mine in a dip.

Instead of an A:B:C comparison, I’m just going to go lens by lens and give you the pros, cons, and my final thoughts.

TL;DR/Conclusion:

You already made it this far, so I’ll reward you with the conclusions early: I’m keeping the Viltrox. It’s kind of the most boring, but it’s got the best image quality across all factors. If you simply can’t afford it, the TTArtisan is good value for money at the cheaper price point and you shouldn’t feel bad about getting it. The 7Artisans is unfortunately kind of a miss: it’s defensible at the $144 I paid, but certainly not at $170. It’s slightly faster than the TTArtisan but you pay for that with softness, and it’s roundly worse than the Viltrox in all but speed and looks, for about the same price. If you’re shooting only posed portraits in low light, maybe this would do, but maybe you need a better lens anyway. The viltrox looks lame, but I’m not buying a showpiece, I’m buying a lens, and the IQ of the Viltrox is what I’m looking for at this price point.

Now I just need to get the slightly more expensive (substantially heavier) Viltrox 33mm F/1.4 XF and compare against that 😁

TTArtisan 35mm F1.8 – $125

TL;DR: it’s not the best lens of the bunch, and I AM returning it, but it really IS great value for money. Wide open at F/1.8, it’s soft in the center and at the corners, no way around it. It’s soft in the center until like F/3.2 and in the corners until F/8. But actually, the lens suffers from a very non-flat field: if you set your focus point to something in the corner, it’s sharper much wider open. Wide open at F1.8, a subject in the corner with the focus point directly on it is actually sharper than the center of the same frame. So TL;DR, it’s soft wide-open, but as long as you have your focus point ON your subject, it’s really not terrible. If you’re one of those “I shoot images not focus charts” kinds of people, this is a great deal at $125.

As for quality of life: the AF performance is pretty decent! it’s not flagship fast to focus, but it’s not really slow either. I realized in the process of testing that I have no idea how Fuji’s AF system works in video mode so I can’t really draw conclusions there. All I can say is that it’s slow but not annoyingly so to refocus in photo mode. And it’s not silent, but not loud either.

From the other standpoints of IQ, it does get quite washed out in direct sunlight while wide open, but they kind of all did. Flaring and ghosting is not good, but also not a deal breaker, certainly not for the price. Bokeh quality, to the very limited extent I tested, was on par with the Viltrox and much better than the 7artisans. This one has quite a lot of pincushion distortion too. Normally I don’t much care about distortion or vignette because they can be fixed in post and usually automatically, but it’s a 3rd party lens, and a cheap one: there’s no in-camera correction profile, nor one in Lightroom. And the distortion profile is complex enough that the single Lightroom “distortion” slider won’t get you perfect results, it’ll just knock out the most obvious first order of the problem.

This one might have the best sun star performance of the bunch, but they all have quite a bit of flare and ghosting so you’ll get a lot of other crud in your frame if you go for stars.

Finally, I think this is one of the better looking lenses on the camera, see images below for comparison. Build quality isn’t TRULY premium but kind of feels it with the all-metal body. On the X-E5 it looks, I don’t know, “serious”? It doesn’t scream “I cost an arm and a leg” but it looks very much at home.

7Artisans 35mm F1.4 – $170, $144 for me

As far as I’m concerned, this one is the best looking of the bunch. It helps that it’s got the largest front element owing to that fastest F/1.4 aperture, but it’s also got a sleek, overall premium build. All-metal, but with a matte finish. It’s not, in practice, appreciably bigger than the other two, but it LOOKS like it is.

Unfortunately, that’s kind of where the wins stop. It’s 2/3 faster than the others at F/1.4, but you probably don’t want to use it there because it’s soft as all hell in the center and at the edges. In the center it’s decently sharp by F/1.8 so at least it’s not WORSE than the others. But the corners are basically useless until F/6.4 which does make it kinda worse than the TTArtisans. And the field seems pretty flat, which means you can’t cheat the problem by moving your focus point to the correct target – if your subject is in a corner it’ll simply be out of focus unless you stop down to like F/8.

Flare and ghosting, best I can tell it’s about the same as the TTArtisan. The hood has some real attention to detail in looks and styling over the others but in practice I’m not sure I’d ever care. Ditortion (barrel, for this one) is about as bad as the TTArtisan in the other direction, with the same problem that it won’t get automatically corrected in camera or in Lightroom. Finally, AF speed is awful. This one really does CHUG. It’s SO slow to move, and quite loud to boot. It’s as loud as the 23mm kit lens (which is otherwise spectacular tbh) but takes literally at least a full second to go from minimum focus to 5m. I don’t need fast focus but I still don’t think I could live with it.

Viltrox AF 35mm/1.7 “Air”

Unfortunately, the Viltrox looks lame and cheap in comparison to the other two. It’s got a plastic build which definitely feels worse. And the rear lens cap it comes with is literally a nightmare – somehow it fits on this lens and this lens alone, and I’ve legitimately gotten it STUCK on my other lenses even without twisting it, it’s that poorly designed. The cap is borderline criminal.

Fortunately, those are really the only two knocks. There’s something about the plastic build that even makes it feel like a pro – like this lens is lighter and less cumbersome than the other two, though in practice I’d never be able to tell the difference. (OK, I weighed them out – the Viltrox is the lightest at 190g with the caps no hood, the TTArtisan is 200g, and the 7Artisans 205g. I’m not going to notice 15g in my pack but the Viltrox IS lightest.) The Viltrox is quite sharp in the center AND corners: sharp enough at F/1.7, tack sharp at F/2.5, and corners about the same. Either Distortion is very well controlled, or the body itself has built-in correction profiles. But even disabling lens correction in Lightroom (which has a profile for this lens!) didn’t result in noticeable distortion, so I think it’s just a well built optical design.

Other IQ factors were at least as good as the TTArtisan, and I think flaring and ghosting was best/lowest of the three. Sun stars looked the worst on this lens but that might be its only loss. Bokeh quality was on par with the TTArtisan, which is to say much better and less hectic than the 7Artisans.

Finally, focus performance is excellent – VERY quiet, and also very fast. It feels like a first party lens there, and somewhat noticeably, it also has the closest minimum focusing distance.

On-Body Look Comparison