Pergear 50mm f1.8 | Sharpest Lens For Under $100?

It’s always a little bit of a mixed bag as to which of these cheap lenses will be good at and will they have a good build quality to go along with it.

There are so many compromises that come with these lenses that it’s almost like the stars have to align perfectly to make a really good lens – I think the stars may have aligned here.

Fujifilm, Nikon, Canon, etc., can all do it because they have 100 years of experience and they can just throw money at problems, but with these little lens companies, they don’t have the millions in R&D and years of time to throw at lens design. This is probably why we are seeing so many little variations to these designed from all these different brands and there are of course known formulas that just work. Which is why you see Viltrox and Tokina sharing optical designs.

The Pergear 50mm f1.8 might be one of those unicorn lenses, like my favorite cheap Chinese lens, the Meike 35mm f1.7.

ISO 200, f5.6, 1/300

Pergear 50mm f1.8 – Amazon

Like with the other Pergear lenses, I’ll do a full review of the Pergear 50mm f1.8 very soon and these are just my first impressions.

These are all half-size WordPress uploads, but you should still get a pretty clear idea of the sharpness with these samples.

Pergear 50mm f1.8 First Impressions

ISO 200, f1.8, 1/15000

Of all the Pergear lenses that’s I’ve been posting samples of for the last few days, this is the one that stands out the most. The other lenses are fine, the 25mm has really nice build quality, but that sharpness just falls off at midframe, then the 35mm f1.6 is just ok. It’s not really doing anything the Meike 35mm f1.7 isn’t doing better, seems a little less sharp as well, but the Pergear has a better build with a nice lens hood.

Then there is this 50mm f1.8 – it’s just sharp. Surprisingly sharp.

I go out almost every night and shoot with the Nikon Z 35mm f1.8 or the Z 85mm f1.8, so that kind of keeps me grounded as to what real high-quality lenses should look like in terms of technical performance, and usually these cheap lenses get close, but don’t compare. This 50mm f1.8 on the other hand had me doing double-takes. Is it really that sharp? – Seems like it.

It’s very odd. Maybe I got lucky with a perfect copy. If you guys have ever read Rogers lens reviews from lens rentals, he’ll post sharpness tables after testing like 20 different copies of the same lenses, and usually with the third party lenses the copy to copy variation is all over the place. So it’s possible I got one of the lucky super sharp copies? But if lenses this sharp for under $100 are out there with this build, I think it’s worth the effort to see if you can get one.

I’m also not affiliated with Pergear, so I’m not trying to sell you anything here. I’m just trying to find the perfect set of cheap Chinese lenses. They reached out to me once, asked me to take a look at their lenses, I said, “sure, send me whatever you got.” They never got back to me and so I went out and bought everything.

ISO 200, f1.8, 1/12000

Lens Flare Samples

Like with a lot of these third-party lenses, you get some pretty cool lens flares with this 50mm Pergear.

This one mostly blooms when wide open which is nice. I’m not seeing too many orbs or anything when wide open, you would probably have to stop down if you want orbs.

The colors are nice, greens, reds, and oranges.

ISO 200, f1.8, 1/5400

ISO 200, f1.8, 1/4000

Problems with the 50mm f1.8

There is always something – right? We can’t just have our cake and eat it too. Which is seriously the dumbest expression there is. But it kind of makes sense, wedding cakes look pretty and they are awesome but also taste delicious, but you can’t eat it or it’s gone. Is that right? Is that what that stupid expression is getting at?

Anyway,

I worry about the build quality of this lens. It feels a little loose like I’m going to break it. The focus is a little sandy feeling and kind of loose.

I abuse these lenses over the months intentionally for my reviews and I have a sneaky suspicion this one will not survive . . . We’ll see.

ISO 200, f5.6, 1/640

ISO 200, f5.6, 1/680

So just to update you guys, I live in Japan but I’ve been stuck in California waiting on a passport that’s was expired. All the passport offices are closed or delayed. I sent my passport in for renewal to the Texas office and they are open and processing but it’s still been 3 months. I’ve decided to get an apartment here and will lock into some projects at the agency I work at until late September. Hopefully, I can go back home Oct if the passport comes. Sucks I missed an entire Spring / Summer in Japan. I bought a house there and have only lived in it for three months.

But hopefully having my own apartment will allow me to sort of getting this site back on track. I got some cool Luminar tutorials I want to share on Youtube as well a million more Lightroom tricks.

I still won’t really be able to shoot much street photography as San Clemente is just a small little beach town with not much going on, and I’m not too comfortable being the creepy guy stalking around the pier with all the high school girls in their bikinis everywhere. I’ll be the creepy guy in any other situation though. 🙂

So far my favorite cheap Chinese lenses are these:

Meike 35mm f1.7 – A gem

Pergear 50mm f1.8 – A sharpness monster

I also thought the Brighton star 50mm f1.4 was a decent lens as well, I think this might be sharper wide open but that’s partly because the Brighton star is an f1.4.

So far none of the other 50mm or 55mm lenses have really excited me except for the more expensive lenses like the Kalman 50mm f1.1 mark II see my review, that lens is so much fun, but incredibly humbling.

For the 23-28mm I still haven’t really found a lens that gets me excited either. The 7Artisans 25mm f1.8 had a really cool rendering, but the build quality was terrible. The Pergear 25mm f1.8 might be the best I’ve tried so far, but I’ll also order the Meike. Then we can see. I think there are only a few different optical designs of the 25mm floating around out there. Pergear has its 5 element design and I think Meike and 7Artisans share the same 7 element design. Often Meike is similar to 7artisans they just use fewer aperture blades, so you can get a little geometry in your bokeh when stopped down.