Not sure what is going on here, but I have bought several 7Art lenses over the years and have had consistently good luck with anything 50mm (equivalent) or longer, but mixed luck with shorter lenses.
The 12mm Vision is very loose on the mount, but focusses nicely/lightly and is a winner optically.
The 35mm Spectrum is a little tight, hard to use without a follow focus and the mount has a tiny amount of play which is noticeable because of it’s tight focus pull. This varies between cameras and the one I use it on (S5) is the better of the two.
The 16mm Hope arrived today and well, the bad luck continues. The other two Hope lenses have been great. Nice and consistent mechanically, hand holdable, smooth to use and sharp.
The 16 has by far the tightest focus pull of any lens I have used in a while*, tight being possibly flattering and the mount on my G9II (first cam I grabbed) is loose in the extreme, like or worse than the 12mm, but the 12mm does not resist focus pulling.
On the GH5s, it is less so, so being it’s likely home, all is ok I guess……, but it needs a follow focus and even then, it is a very different experience to the 25 or 50. I bought it as a run-n-gun lens, which is not where it would shine, if at all. To be honest, I have always suspected that for that type of work, a stabilised and/or AF zoom lens (8-18, 12-60) would probably be used anyway.
The reality is, the G9II misses little and can act like a gimbal cam if used well, so why compromise?
It looks ok optically, well so far after just a couple of images.
Ed. Soft down the left side with very bad, as in bright blue and blotchy CA (see bottom right). I struggled to get consistently sharp shots with it after about 50 attempts, then switched to the 25mm and got 4 out of 4. I feel it is poor close and de-centred.
It is going back and I will probably not bother with another. It was a lens I baulked at once, then went for, then regretted (the 12mm after cropping is fine), then was disappointed with anyway. Not auspicious by any measure.
In answer to the question I posed in another post, “Do you need a cinema lens?”, I guess for me it is also a tough question, very dependent on circumstance.
I do not need them for commercial work, indeed my go-to lenses for most of my commercial jobs are the safe and easy to use Lumix-S primes or the decent kit zoom for my S5’s, the 8-18 or 12-60 Leicas for the G9II (used with stabe and AF for that role) and the GH5s, my most cine rigged of cams gets cine or stills glass as needed (often the 12-40 Olympus which has excellent optics, just worn mechanics).
The 25 and 50 Hope lenses were bought as matching interview lenses, but to be honest I have the Spectrum and Lumix primes and they are the 35/50 combo I use most.
I guess I just like having cine glass, the lenses I have are excellent, the experience is sometimes better than using AF stills lenses, promoting good disciplines when it makes sense to use them and they do look the biz, but no, I do not need them.
This rig actually looks odd with a tiny M43 prime up front.
I am not going to make a movie, probably not even a documentary, just do little jobs that mean something to me, so I will call it here. Maybe another BMVA12g, so I can double cam with B-Raw.
My “head” ideal would have been the 10-25 and 25-50 f1.7 zooms in MFT (and no full frame), or the S-Primes (24 to 85) in full frame (35-135 APS-c), but probably not both.
From here, even though I prefer the format and technically my two “best” video cams are MFT, it seems now my video direction is leaning more towards full frame, so possibly the 24 S-Prime to complete my set, the excellent 24-70 Leica or maybe the well liked 24-105 or even a Sigma f2.8 model?