**A Review of the Nisi 580mm f/8 Lens**

I recently had the opportunity to review the Nisi 580mm f/8 lens, which is a new addition to the company's product line. As a third-party lens manufacturer, Nisi is taking a bold move by entering the market with their first lens, and I was excited to see how it would perform.

**Field Curvature**

One thing that caught my attention while reviewing the lens was its field curvature. Field curvature refers to the way a lens curves the image on the sensor, which can affect the sharpness of the image, especially at the edges. In this case, I noticed that the field curvature is pretty well controlled for a lens at this price point, but it just doesn't extend to the corners like you want it to. In fact, it falls very short.

**MTF Charts**

I was impressed by the MTF (Modulation Transfer Function) charts provided on Nisi's website, which showed impressive performance. However, I have to note that when I actually used the lens and compared it to other lenses I've reviewed in the past, the results were less than stellar. The lens performed well in the center of the image, but struggled at the edges.

**Resolution and Performance**

One thing that's interesting about this lens is its resolution. When you scale back the resolution from a high-megapixel camera, it becomes less dependent on the focal length. In my case, I used the lens on a 24-megapixel camera (my A7III) and found that it performed better than expected.

However, I also want to mention that this lens has some limitations. As a circular projection lens, it will always be sharper in the center of the image than at the edges. This is due to the way the lens projects the image onto the sensor.

**Comparison with Other Lenses**

I was curious about how the Fujifilm X-mount version of this lens would perform, and I did some tests using my A7III in APS-C mode (which effectively makes it a 22mm lens). The results were slightly better than the full-frame versions, which suggests that Nisi may have improved the lens's performance for the smaller sensor.

**A Big Con: No XF Data**

One thing that really grated on me while reviewing this lens was the lack of EXIF data. As someone who's very nitpicky about EXIF information, I found it frustrating to not be able to see what aperture setting the lens was set to. To get around this, I had to create an EXIF preset in XF Editor just to identify the lens.

**Who is This Lens For?**

So, who is this lens for? If you're someone building a system and looking at third-party lenses on a budget, I think this is a great option. The Nisi 580mm f/8 is perfect for architecture or wide-angle landscape photography where you need clean lines and minimal distortion. And at $580 retail, it's an excellent choice.

**Nissi's Bold Move**

I want to give a shout-out to Nissi, who are traditionally a filter company making their first foray into lens manufacturing. It takes guts to enter a tough market like this, and I think they're onto something special. Their bold move to challenge the established players in the industry is admirable.

**Industry Trends**

It's also interesting to note that the photography industry has changed significantly over the years. Brands like Leica, Zeiss, and Voigtlander have been around for centuries, and their lenses are often considered benchmarks for quality. Meanwhile, companies like Sony, Nikon, and Canon have had to adapt to new technologies and trends.

**Sony's Smart Move**

One of Sony's smart moves was to go into a co-branding partnership with Zeiss. This has helped them develop high-quality lenses that meet the demands of their mirrorless cameras. I think Nisi could learn from this strategy, as they're competing in a crowded market.

**Conclusion**

Overall, my experience with the Nisi 580mm f/8 lens was mixed. While it performs well for its price point and has some impressive features, it falls short in terms of sharpness at the edges. I would recommend it to anyone looking for an affordable wide-angle lens, but also caution that it's not perfect.

As a newcomer to the market, Nissi is taking a bold step into uncharted territory. I hope they'll continue to innovate and improve their products as they gain more experience. And who knows? Maybe one day we'll see a revised version of this lens that addresses some of its limitations.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and even analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone it's time to do a little lens days video so today we've got an interesting lens we're going to be talking about which is this one this is the niecy 15 millimeter f4 sunstar super wide angle lens this is a lens that was getting a lot of pr a few weeks ago when it was announced now full disclosure this is not a sponsored video nisi did send me the lens to review the opinions here are going to be mine but this is a very moderately priced lens from a company that's not really known for making lenses so who are nissi nisi is probably best known for their filter business they've done filters for a number of years now they have systems for mounting to ultra wide angle lenses well i don't know a little while back they changed the name from naci filters to nasi optics and this is their first lens so i assume this is something they're going to be doing more of so 15 millimeter f4 they call this a sun star lens so it has 10 straight aperture blades and you pretty much get sun stars at small points of lights at any aperture and it comes in four different mounts i'm obviously testing the sony e-mount version but you can also get it in canon rf nikon z mount as well as fujifilm x-mount fujifilm x-mount is obviously aps-c size so it ends up being a 22 millimeter-ish equivalent which gives you still a very unique prime lens in that lineup let's talk about optics this lens features 12 elements in 10 groups there's one a spherical element and two extra low dispersion elements that is a lot of glass but surprisingly this lens isn't very heavy it's a lightweight lens now it's not too lightweight it doesn't feel plasticky or cheap it doesn't weight the camera funny i think they did a really nice job just with the ergonomics now this lens is a manual focus design and features a manual aperture ring now this can be de-clicked but the downside of all this being fully manual is it also does not transmit exif data to the camera and i'll get into that in a little bit because that's a little bit of a downside for me but i think they've designed a pretty ergonomic lens that feels pretty good to use it comes with a lens hood that snaps into place you will need this this is a little bit prone to flare it's not horrible but it does help to have the lens hood and despite the fact that it's a pretty wide angle lens we still have filter threading which is awesome there's a 72 millimeter film thread and so you can use whatever filter to screw in that you want with this also worth noting that we do have distance markings as well as depth of field on the physical lens let's talk about image quality now one thing you have to consider in this lens in context is the price point this is a 580 lens so it's not very expensive within lens design even with modern production when you have price is a factor in the design of the lens there usually is a lot you have to give up i'm actually very impressed nicey did it so well because this is their first lens coming out of the gate considering that considering the price point and the fact that it's an ultra wide angle lens it's actually impressive the one thing i didn't expect to be very good was distortion control now there is a little bit of distortion in here you can clean most of it up in your applications like lightroom or even capture one but it actually is fairly well handled considering this price point and that was the one thing i figured this would start to kind of fisheye a little bit and just not be as good and so that's one thing that i can say about this i think is absolutely fantastic there's some other second tier things that are pretty good but just kind of okay that you need to be aware of one of them would be vignetting now you can expect because it's an ultra wide lens you are going to see some light fall off this is going to be less noticeable if you're using it on the fujifilm x-mount version because it is just cropping in on the center in an aps-c format but if you're using the full-frame version you will notice vignetting now one thing theoretically with any lens is that wide open you're going to see all of the deficiencies or the weaknesses in the lens at its widest aperture when you stop down you want to see these things start to clean up and vignetting is one of those things and when you stop down there still is a little bit vignetting even at f8 f11 it's not terrible you can work with it it doesn't it's not prominent in the image but i think that's one thing to point out because it is there another very impressive point about this lens is its close focus capability so the minimum focus distance on here is 0.2 meters so you can get really close up on things you start to get a little bit of a bouquet around that and it looks pretty good so that's kind of a plus for this lens flare resistance is something you need to be aware of with this lens especially if you're going to be shooting in direct light of any kind now i found that this is a tough thing to actually test because you know you can get any lens to flare and obviously i'm trying to test this but i did notice that it would sneak up on me at times when i didn't really expect it just because of the nature it's a wide angle lens you can just recompose slightly and usually get rid of it you definitely want to be using that lens hood but it's something to be aware of so i want to talk some more about who this lens would be for and i do have a couple cons to point out to you guys but first real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace is the easiest way to build a photography website and earn money while doing it so start with one of their award-winning templates and build your site you can drag and drop images to build beautiful galleries so there's no code to write and no server to manage squarespace also have tools to make your website work for you they now have member only areas for managing an audience and communicating directly complete with audience insights make money with their advanced e-commerce tools for merchandising inventory management secure payments and you can also extend e-commerce with squarespace extensions these are third-party tools that let you manage inventory bookkeeping filing sales tax and even shipping items across the globe you can take your photography and turn it into a business that works for you so head over to squarespace.com and sign up for the free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com aop and save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.comaop and i want to give a special shout out and thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video okay so let's talk about some areas that i feel could be improved on one that i think is a flat out con and really who this lens is designed for first there is the elephant in the room that everybody puts importance on with any lens which is sharpness and resolution now at 580 i really didn't have incredible expectations for this and i will say that it came in better than what i expected i think it could be sharper now i do want to note though nicey didn't tell me if this was a pre-production version and of course there is things to take into account like copy variation so on so forth this is something that might be different and it may be just my copy but i really expected this to be sharper in fact if we do a field curvature test and the way that i do these is i take a picture of something flat that has texture in this case the street you can put it into photoshop you run it through the find edges filter and what it does is it makes dark anything that's super sharp and you're going to see that two things you can see the field curvature in here which is pretty well controlled for a lens at this price point but it just doesn't extend to the corners like you want it to in fact it falls very short now having said that i will note something with this the mtf charts that they put on their site look really impressive now i've looked at a lot of mtf charts and actually used the lenses that they co-relate to and i will tell you it was pretty kind of dismal with my a7 r4 now that is not a fair comparison putting a 580 lens on a 3 000 high megapixel camera but i will say when you scale back the resolution it's not as dependent so if you use it on a 24 megapixel camera in this case i'm using my a7 3 it does perform a little bit better i will also say that any lens because it has a circular projection that it puts onto the sensor it's going to be sharper in the center in all cases than it is towards the edges which makes me curious about the fujifilm x-mount version of this lens i think it will actually perform better with that than it will on the full frame versions you could also put it on something like the sony a7r and did some tests with this and run it in aps-c mode it does become a 22 millimeter lens but it just has a little bit better perceived performance at that level i would like to see a slightly sharper lens from nisi having said that this is a new business for them this is their first lens i would expect to see improvements going down the road now there is one thing that is a big con for me and that's the fact that it doesn't give the camera any xf data information i'm pretty sure or at least i'm gonna guess it's because they're supporting four different mounts out of the gate but that's something that they really do need especially and i guess it's a little bit different when you're testing a lens for a review but as i'm reviewing this lens and i'm looking back through my images i can't tell what aperture anything was set to i had to create an exif preset in xf editor just to get it to identify the lens so i could create a smart collection for that it's one thing that i'm super nitpicky about and it is a con on this lens i really wish they would have some way of giving exif data to the camera so who is this lens for well i think if you're someone who has a system you're trying to build on a budget and you're starting to look at third party lenses i think this is a really valid option if you want to shoot architecture or even wide-angle landscape images where you need to have clean lines and you don't want a lot of distortion and you don't want to spend a lot of money on a lens i think at 580 retail this is an excellent choice i wish it could be sharper but i think for what it's supposed to do it gets the job done and if you like sun stars it does an excellent job at those so one thing i want to add to all this is hats off to nissi who are traditionally a filter company to be making a lens now i think this is a really bold move and this is a tough business to compete in so first of all not only is it difficult to design and expensive to make lenses that's a feat right there but it's also very difficult and tough to market them and get people interested in what it is that you're trying to do when you look at the photography business what lenses sell and what price points you've got your old stalwarts and they're mainly brand names they may have been sold two or three times in their 200 year existence but like voigtlander zeiss these are companies that have a long history leica certainly i think even nikon and canon you could put into that echelon too now sony had a problem when they first came out with doing their own lenses and one of their smart moves that they made was they went into a co-branding thing with zeiss today it's a little bit different they've got a little more than a decade under their belt with mirrorless and i think that those lenses are excellent what i'm saying though is it's tough to get into as a third party when you're competing against sigma and tamron and other companies that make pretty good lenses and here you are with your one little lens out of the gate so i'm very supportive of what nissi are doing on this and it'll be interesting to see what they do moving forward i'd love to hear from you guys so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and even analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone it's time to do a little lens days video so today we've got an interesting lens we're going to be talking about which is this one this is the niecy 15 millimeter f4 sunstar super wide angle lens this is a lens that was getting a lot of pr a few weeks ago when it was announced now full disclosure this is not a sponsored video nisi did send me the lens to review the opinions here are going to be mine but this is a very moderately priced lens from a company that's not really known for making lenses so who are nissi nisi is probably best known for their filter business they've done filters for a number of years now they have systems for mounting to ultra wide angle lenses well i don't know a little while back they changed the name from naci filters to nasi optics and this is their first lens so i assume this is something they're going to be doing more of so 15 millimeter f4 they call this a sun star lens so it has 10 straight aperture blades and you pretty much get sun stars at small points of lights at any aperture and it comes in four different mounts i'm obviously testing the sony e-mount version but you can also get it in canon rf nikon z mount as well as fujifilm x-mount fujifilm x-mount is obviously aps-c size so it ends up being a 22 millimeter-ish equivalent which gives you still a very unique prime lens in that lineup let's talk about optics this lens features 12 elements in 10 groups there's one a spherical element and two extra low dispersion elements that is a lot of glass but surprisingly this lens isn't very heavy it's a lightweight lens now it's not too lightweight it doesn't feel plasticky or cheap it doesn't weight the camera funny i think they did a really nice job just with the ergonomics now this lens is a manual focus design and features a manual aperture ring now this can be de-clicked but the downside of all this being fully manual is it also does not transmit exif data to the camera and i'll get into that in a little bit because that's a little bit of a downside for me but i think they've designed a pretty ergonomic lens that feels pretty good to use it comes with a lens hood that snaps into place you will need this this is a little bit prone to flare it's not horrible but it does help to have the lens hood and despite the fact that it's a pretty wide angle lens we still have filter threading which is awesome there's a 72 millimeter film thread and so you can use whatever filter to screw in that you want with this also worth noting that we do have distance markings as well as depth of field on the physical lens let's talk about image quality now one thing you have to consider in this lens in context is the price point this is a 580 lens so it's not very expensive within lens design even with modern production when you have price is a factor in the design of the lens there usually is a lot you have to give up i'm actually very impressed nicey did it so well because this is their first lens coming out of the gate considering that considering the price point and the fact that it's an ultra wide angle lens it's actually impressive the one thing i didn't expect to be very good was distortion control now there is a little bit of distortion in here you can clean most of it up in your applications like lightroom or even capture one but it actually is fairly well handled considering this price point and that was the one thing i figured this would start to kind of fisheye a little bit and just not be as good and so that's one thing that i can say about this i think is absolutely fantastic there's some other second tier things that are pretty good but just kind of okay that you need to be aware of one of them would be vignetting now you can expect because it's an ultra wide lens you are going to see some light fall off this is going to be less noticeable if you're using it on the fujifilm x-mount version because it is just cropping in on the center in an aps-c format but if you're using the full-frame version you will notice vignetting now one thing theoretically with any lens is that wide open you're going to see all of the deficiencies or the weaknesses in the lens at its widest aperture when you stop down you want to see these things start to clean up and vignetting is one of those things and when you stop down there still is a little bit vignetting even at f8 f11 it's not terrible you can work with it it doesn't it's not prominent in the image but i think that's one thing to point out because it is there another very impressive point about this lens is its close focus capability so the minimum focus distance on here is 0.2 meters so you can get really close up on things you start to get a little bit of a bouquet around that and it looks pretty good so that's kind of a plus for this lens flare resistance is something you need to be aware of with this lens especially if you're going to be shooting in direct light of any kind now i found that this is a tough thing to actually test because you know you can get any lens to flare and obviously i'm trying to test this but i did notice that it would sneak up on me at times when i didn't really expect it just because of the nature it's a wide angle lens you can just recompose slightly and usually get rid of it you definitely want to be using that lens hood but it's something to be aware of so i want to talk some more about who this lens would be for and i do have a couple cons to point out to you guys but first real quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com squarespace is the easiest way to build a photography website and earn money while doing it so start with one of their award-winning templates and build your site you can drag and drop images to build beautiful galleries so there's no code to write and no server to manage squarespace also have tools to make your website work for you they now have member only areas for managing an audience and communicating directly complete with audience insights make money with their advanced e-commerce tools for merchandising inventory management secure payments and you can also extend e-commerce with squarespace extensions these are third-party tools that let you manage inventory bookkeeping filing sales tax and even shipping items across the globe you can take your photography and turn it into a business that works for you so head over to squarespace.com and sign up for the free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com aop and save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.comaop and i want to give a special shout out and thank you to squarespace for sponsoring this video okay so let's talk about some areas that i feel could be improved on one that i think is a flat out con and really who this lens is designed for first there is the elephant in the room that everybody puts importance on with any lens which is sharpness and resolution now at 580 i really didn't have incredible expectations for this and i will say that it came in better than what i expected i think it could be sharper now i do want to note though nicey didn't tell me if this was a pre-production version and of course there is things to take into account like copy variation so on so forth this is something that might be different and it may be just my copy but i really expected this to be sharper in fact if we do a field curvature test and the way that i do these is i take a picture of something flat that has texture in this case the street you can put it into photoshop you run it through the find edges filter and what it does is it makes dark anything that's super sharp and you're going to see that two things you can see the field curvature in here which is pretty well controlled for a lens at this price point but it just doesn't extend to the corners like you want it to in fact it falls very short now having said that i will note something with this the mtf charts that they put on their site look really impressive now i've looked at a lot of mtf charts and actually used the lenses that they co-relate to and i will tell you it was pretty kind of dismal with my a7 r4 now that is not a fair comparison putting a 580 lens on a 3 000 high megapixel camera but i will say when you scale back the resolution it's not as dependent so if you use it on a 24 megapixel camera in this case i'm using my a7 3 it does perform a little bit better i will also say that any lens because it has a circular projection that it puts onto the sensor it's going to be sharper in the center in all cases than it is towards the edges which makes me curious about the fujifilm x-mount version of this lens i think it will actually perform better with that than it will on the full frame versions you could also put it on something like the sony a7r and did some tests with this and run it in aps-c mode it does become a 22 millimeter lens but it just has a little bit better perceived performance at that level i would like to see a slightly sharper lens from nisi having said that this is a new business for them this is their first lens i would expect to see improvements going down the road now there is one thing that is a big con for me and that's the fact that it doesn't give the camera any xf data information i'm pretty sure or at least i'm gonna guess it's because they're supporting four different mounts out of the gate but that's something that they really do need especially and i guess it's a little bit different when you're testing a lens for a review but as i'm reviewing this lens and i'm looking back through my images i can't tell what aperture anything was set to i had to create an exif preset in xf editor just to get it to identify the lens so i could create a smart collection for that it's one thing that i'm super nitpicky about and it is a con on this lens i really wish they would have some way of giving exif data to the camera so who is this lens for well i think if you're someone who has a system you're trying to build on a budget and you're starting to look at third party lenses i think this is a really valid option if you want to shoot architecture or even wide-angle landscape images where you need to have clean lines and you don't want a lot of distortion and you don't want to spend a lot of money on a lens i think at 580 retail this is an excellent choice i wish it could be sharper but i think for what it's supposed to do it gets the job done and if you like sun stars it does an excellent job at those so one thing i want to add to all this is hats off to nissi who are traditionally a filter company to be making a lens now i think this is a really bold move and this is a tough business to compete in so first of all not only is it difficult to design and expensive to make lenses that's a feat right there but it's also very difficult and tough to market them and get people interested in what it is that you're trying to do when you look at the photography business what lenses sell and what price points you've got your old stalwarts and they're mainly brand names they may have been sold two or three times in their 200 year existence but like voigtlander zeiss these are companies that have a long history leica certainly i think even nikon and canon you could put into that echelon too now sony had a problem when they first came out with doing their own lenses and one of their smart moves that they made was they went into a co-branding thing with zeiss today it's a little bit different they've got a little more than a decade under their belt with mirrorless and i think that those lenses are excellent what i'm saying though is it's tough to get into as a third party when you're competing against sigma and tamron and other companies that make pretty good lenses and here you are with your one little lens out of the gate so i'm very supportive of what nissi are doing on this and it'll be interesting to see what they do moving forward i'd love to hear from you guys so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"