Brightin Star

The Funleader x Brightin Star XSLIM-M 28mm F2.8 is a teeny tiny pancake for Leica M

Jul 5, 2023 by John Aldred Add Comment

There aren’t many lenses out there that stick out less than a centimetre from the front of your camera, but the new Funleader x Brightin Star XSLIM-M 28mm f/2.8 (buy here) is one of them. To be fair, it’s barely a hair under 1cm, at 0.99cm, but it’s still pretty tiny.

It’s designed for Leica M rangefinders, sporting the Leica M mount, and offers a respectably wide 28mm focal length with an equally respectable f/2.8 aperture. Sure, it’s not super fast, but for a pancake lens, this small, f/2.8 is pretty quick.

This 50mm f/0.95 face-off puts Laowa vs Mitakon vs TTArtisan vs Brightin Star lenses against each other

Mar 18, 2022 by John Aldred Add Comment

There seem to be a lot of very fast lens options these days, even for full-frame cameras. Very few are them are coming from the long-established big-name companies like the camera manufacturers themselves or even Sigma and Tamron, but there are a lot of manual focus ones coming from some of the newer Chinese lens manufacturers.

In this video, Christopher Frost puts four full-frame 50mm f/0.95 lenses to the test to see how they stack up against each other, including the Mitakon, TTArtisan, Brightin Star and the recently announced Laowa Argus lens. The Laowa is a hair wider than the other three at 45mm rather than 50, but it’s close enough.

Dave Williams is an accomplished travel photographer, writer, and best-selling author from the UK. He is also a photography educator and published Aurora expert. Dave has traveled extensively in recent years, capturing stunning images from around the world in a modified van. His work has been featured in various publications and he has worked with notable brands such as Skoda, EE, Boeing, Huawei, Microsoft, BMW, Conde Nast, Electronic Arts, Discovery, BBC, The Guardian, ESPN, NBC, and many others.

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