There’s no shortage of cheap Chinese glass around. Some lenses are better than others—but how do you define “better”? Are you really looking to get top-end optical performance when you spend under £100 on a lens, or is it “better” to have something that brings something to an image that no expensive lens would ever dare to do?
Before we start, if you’re expecting pixel-peeping or detailed optical comparisons, you should look for another review. In fact even if you’re looking for straight out-of-camera images you should also look elsewhere. The images here (nearly all of which were taken in the Lake District in August this year) have been processed quite intentionally to exploit the characteristics of this lens.
The practical stuff
As lenses go, the Pergear 10mm f/8 is about as simple as they come, which should be no huge surprise given that it sells for around £60. It isn’t fixed focus, but it’s likely to be a rare occasion that you actually use its quirky little focusing lever.
If you don’t like the idea of a lever and prefer a focusing ring, it seems that this lens is also available as the more conventionally-designed Rockstar version—but although I was unsure about the lever at first, I find it works well. It’s smooth in use but very firm, so it won’t move out of position accidentally, and it’s easy to know where focus is by feeling the position of the lever.
As for the rest of the practical stuff:
It’s dead small, making most X-system bodies pocketable—see the image below where I have a top loader bag containing my X-T2 and 16-80 lens in the main compartment: the Pergear on an X-T1 slips easily into the accessory pocket on the front.
It’s a reassuringly weighty chunk of metal, and there are almost no moving parts so there’s nothing much to come loose or break. It has no filter thread and no hood, it comes with a sturdy and nicely-fitting push-on metal cap that doesn’t fall off, and that’s pretty much all you need to know.
It’s a real “fit and forget” lens, basically, and there’s nothing to complain about on the practical side. The only gripe I have is incredibly minor: when mounted, the whole thing is offset just a degree or two anti-clockwise.
Making images
The Pergear is nominally a fisheye lens. But as fisheyes go, it has a relatively modest fisheye effect. If you’re shooting organic shapes like hills and valleys then it’s entirely possible to produce images which aren’t at all obviously from a fisheye lens, whilst it’s equally possible to use the distortion to emphasise curves towards the edge of the frame.
Personally I find this characteristic immensely appealing—to some extent it’s like being able to switch between a true fisheye and a rectilinear lens simply by adjusting composition. But if you’re looking for a stronger fisheye effect then you may, apparently, be better served by Pergear’s newer 10mm f/5.6 fisheye.
Sharpness is better than I’d anticipated. Sure, it’s not going to compete with a Fujifilm XF lens, but it’s plenty adequate for what I want—I’ve happily printed an image from the 16MP X-T1 at 60cm wide with no complaints. Inevitably the corners become a little softer—but not by that much, all things considered; they’re still way better than I was expecting from such a cheap lens.
As for its other characteristics: there’s a good dose of vignetting (note that in most if not all of these images I’ve added more vignetting in Lightroom), and it comes with colour shift. In particular, blues will often—but not always—become rather purple near the corners of the frame. I don’t object to light falloff, but the hue shift is less appealing.
As with any somewhat less-than-perfect lens, these characteristics combine to inform how the lens might be used to best effect. The combination of the modest fisheye effect and the vignetting lean towards central composition, while the hue shift can be disregarded when shooting in black and white.
Moreover, the ultra-wide angle, the distortion and the vignetting all come together in what I think is a rather splendid way.
This lens is capable of swallowing huge landscapes in its field of view, but rather than open up the scene as a “better” lens would, the vignetting and distortion serve to pull the edges back in. Suddenly that big, majestic vista is cowering under the sky. If you want a heavy atmosphere, you can get it.
An expansive ridge of hills can be made claustrophobic in a way that comes naturally to this lens but can be hard to achieve with others. Rocks in the foreground can be made to loom out of the darkness. Even the slightest bit of cloud cover can become an oppressive, brooding sky that evokes a certain bleakness.
This type of image lends itself to certain Lightroom adjustments: often I amplify the vignetting and apply the dehaze filter to exaggerate the texture in the sky, also pulling the blacks down to further darken the mood.
All of this doesn’t necessarily make it a one-trick pony. Big landscapes are perhaps the most evident subject where its characteristics can really be exploited, but the fresh perspective of using it elsewhere is nonetheless appealing.
One area where it seems to be curiously affable is when mounted to my full-spectrum converted body. Now, you can’t fit an filter to this lens (though never say “can’t”: I’ve just bought a 30mm IR filter which I intend to remove from its rim and stick to the rear of the lens with removable adhesive) but it seems to have a knack for full-spectrum images anyway.
Overall, I find this lens a joy to use. Having used the Olympus M43 body cap fisheye in the past, I was very pleasantly surprised that this one brings bags of character and atmosphere where the Olympus had none, and that its distortion characteristics are so much more versatile.
Even if I owned the impressive XF 10-20 (which I did, very briefly) or any other high-quality ultra wide, I would undoubtedly keep this lens. It can simply do things that those lenses can’t.