The Funleader Caplens 18mm f/8.0 is ideal for those days when you want to have some fun with your camera and get creative.
Initially, I found myself waiting for the AF confirmation as it takes a little while to get used to not having to focus the lens. But once you get over that, it’s just a case of reminding yourself to stay at least 80cm/2.63feet from the subject.
Naturally, with no aperture control, it’s best to use the camera in aperture priority or manual exposure mode. I opted for aperture priority with the sensitivity (ISO) set to Auto. With the minimum shutter speed set to something safe, for example, 1/30th sec, this means you can almost completely concentrate on the composition and not worry about exposure other than tweaking the compensation to get the result you want.
This isn’t a lens for pixel-peeping, at normal viewing sizes, images look acceptably sharp, but if you zoom in to 100% on a computer screen, you won’t see as much detail as you might be used to from you usual lenses. There’s also very heavy vignetting, which some may hate, but I think it’s part of the charm. With close subjects, it looks almost like a small built-in flash has fired.
I used the Funleader Caplens 18mm f/8.0 on the Sony A7R IV, a 61Mp full-frame camera thats designed for capturing lots of sharp detail, which might seem counter intuitive, but they worked well together, making a delightfully small camera set-up.
I mainly used the camera with the white balance set to the Daylight setting and using the Standard Creative Style in its default settings. This produced quite vibrant images with higher contrast than I’d normally expect.
There’s slight barrel distortion visible, but chromatic aberration and flare don’t appear to be major issues.
