[PaulHoule]

This lens

https://7artisans.store/products/50mm-f1-05

is a fantastic wide aperture lens which is commercially available, affordable and a great value. Personally I tend to get bored if I am walking around with a 50mm lens but with that lens, the challenge of manual focus, the ability to take photos with hardly any light, and the ability to take dreamy photos like people have never seen I have so much fun. They make it for all the major camera brands.

Overall I am impressed with Chinese lens manufacturers who make other lenses like

https://www.venuslens.net/product/laowa-9mm-f-5-6-ff-rl/

which again are a great value and let me take pictures you haven't seen before.

https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/9mm

[atombender]

Laowa (aka Venus Optics) makes a range of excellent macro lenses, too. I use the 65mm f/2.8 2x macro with my Fujifilm cameras, and supposedly it improves on even Fujifilm's famous 80mm macro in sharpness.

Another fun, small one is the Korean brand Samyang (also sold as Rokinon, Bower, and some other names). Their 12mm f/2.0 manual wide angle is excellent despite being quite cheap. Photos I take with it often get a unique look that I can't really explain.

[walrus01]

There have been significant advances in mainland china made scopes in the last 5-7 years as well. For instance the Arken EP5 5-25x56, 34mm tube first focal plane. Which until recent tariffs and things sold for around $400 to 500 USD shipped. No it's not as good as a $1299 or $2199 Vortex, but it's definitely not the junk-tier stuff that was completely disregarded by everyone who wanted something usable on a budget for >500 yards.

[germinalphrase]

Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.

[zimpenfish]

I've got the 7A 35mm f/1.2 in M43 which is pretty nice for a walkaround lens.

I'd probably opt for the 50mm f/1.2 since it's 1/3 the price of the f/1.05 (£90 vs £260 for the M43 mount) if I didn't already have double-digit number of 50s in PK mount that I use with an adapter (and they're surprisingly good for 30-50 year old lenses.)

(I've got a 7A 10mm f/3.5 that I've not really got around to using much but now the UK is heading into Fake Summer, there's more light to make it useful.)

[hdndjsbbs]

Worth pointing out that there's a 2x crop factor on M43, so the 50mm M43 is effectively a 100mm. I agree that 35mm on M43 is a nice walk around length, it's a little longer than a full frame 50mm already.

[niccolove]

And keep in mind crop factor applies to aperture too! A 50mm f1 on M43 in equivalent to 100mm f2.

[wao0uuno]

If you're thinking about the depth of field then yes. Exposure wise f1 is f1 no matter the sensor size.

[niccolove]

I think that actually it applies to exposure too? Because a M43 sensor is going to be "half" the size of Full Frame, which means that the pixels will have 1/4 of the area, so you need 4 times the light to have the same amount of noise per pixel, i.e. two stops of light... but feel free to correct me here, I only have double checked the math on the depth of field part of it.

[wao0uuno]

Yeah kinda. Amount of light per area is the same but smaller sensors have smaller pixels that have worse SNR. This means the sensor receives the same amount of light per area but still needs to boost the signal more because of smaller pixels. I believe that if a full frame camera and MFT camera with the same pixel pitch and lens existed it would get exactly the same SNR and exposure. So basically with smaller sensors DOF is increased, exposure remains the same, SNR gets worse.

[fennecfoxy]

Manual focus I keep for film, I feel like it's a part of the process.

But I do wish my Sony 50 was a little less noisy/slow. Suppose I should pick up the GM version at some point.

[pnathan]

I have found TTArtisans 50mm f0.95 to be quite nice.