Quick take: The Pergear 25mm F1.7 is a $65 all-metal manual lens for Fujifilm X-mount that performs about as well as many $500 to $700 small primes for image quality. It has almost no fringing, comfortable ergonomics and a filmic softness. Its one big flaw is extreme flaring when light hits the front element.
Why I Agreed to Review a $65 Lens
Pergear asked if I wanted to review this lens and I almost said no. Budget manual lens reviews all sound the same: soft wide open, bad fringing in high-contrast scenes, sharpens up by F4 or F5.6, no weather sealing. What got me interested was the price. At the time of filming it was $65 on Pergear's site and a little more, around $70 to $75, on Amazon.
It turned out to be both better and worse than I expected, in different ways. Keep the price in mind as I grill it, because you won't find many brand-new lenses at $65.
Who It's For
It's for someone who caught the film photography bug but shoots digital. Maybe you'd normally try vintage lenses, but you don't want to buy an adapter or spend money on an old Canon FD lens. This gives you a filmic look natively on your Fuji for very little money.
Build and First Impressions
The all-metal construction is really nice and doesn't feel cheap. The packaging is the kind more lenses should have, simple, with a small lens pouch that's handy for keeping something this tiny from getting lost in a backpack.
It's very small, and that has one downside: it's hard to reach around with a battery grip. My X-H2S with its grip is usually my YouTube camera, but I put the lens on the X-T5 for the day. Honestly it looks better on the X-T5 anyway. It suits that retro style.
Before You Mount It: Set the Focal Length
There are no electronic contacts, so you'll need to turn on shooting without a lens. More importantly, set the focal length in the mount adapter settings to 25mm. Use the real focal length, not the full-frame equivalent. That makes focus peaking accurate and, more importantly, lets IBIS compensate correctly. If you've ever adapted a lens without contacts and had jittery IBIS, this is probably why.
Your EXIF will still show ISO and shutter speed, but not aperture.
Ergonomics
The aperture ring is nice and clicky with a short quarter-turn throw, which I like. The focus ring takes about a half turn. At a 37.5mm full-frame equivalent you're not doing macro work, so a half turn is plenty, and it's easy to nail focus on a subject wide open. Even in the bulky cage on my X-T5 it was comfortable all day. Full marks for ergonomics on the X-T bodies and X-Pro cameras.
Photo Walk: Fringing and Sharpness
On a snowy, icy day, which should be the worst case, I was shocked to find almost no fringing. Photos were sharp enough for me, especially for $65, and that's on a 40-megapixel APS-C sensor that exaggerates lens flaws far more than the X-T3's or X-T4's 26-megapixel sensor.
Fine text isn't surgically sharp, but who cares unless you're scanning museum documents. The softness helps with the filmic look. Comparing F8 to F1.7, color and contrast are better stopped down, as expected, but you have to look closely to see it.
The Flaring Problem
This is where I first saw the issue. Shooting toward the sun, the flaring made images completely unusable for me. It looks like reflections between the internal elements, and the only fix is to physically block light from hitting the lens: move yourself or your subject, or have a friend hold up something big to shade it.
The twist is that in a studio, where you control the lights, that flaw becomes a strength. A small light is enough to get really cool flare effects in photos and video. I'd love to do a portrait session with it. It's a similar focal length to my old Ricoh GR IIIx, but much faster.
Backlit subjects are fine as long as the sun isn't hitting the front element directly. Details at the edges of a backlit clump of snow held up even when I punched in.
Second Photo Walk
A few days later, with the snow mostly gone and kinder light, shots were naturally more vibrant and detailed. For a lot of them, I'd have a hard time telling them apart from my Fuji primes. That's not a knock on Fuji's primes, which are better in every way a lens can be better. It's to show how good a $65 lens can be now and how far budget options have come.
Video
With a 37mm ND and CPL combo filter, it was an even better video lens than a photo lens. IBIS worked very well with the focal length set correctly, and the softness takes the edge off digital sharpness in the same way mist filters or haze do. For talking-head videos or a cheap second angle on a client shoot, the image looked as good as any other photo lens. The flaring is just as pronounced in video, though.
Final Thoughts
The only real issue I'd flag is the flaring. Otherwise it's under $100, tiny and fast, looks good on the camera, and most importantly it makes really good-looking images. Buying direct from Pergear is the cheapest way to get it.
Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.
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