Joined in 2023 
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Chromatic Aberration: Longitudinal CA is low, lower than I would have expected. This is good news, because makes the lateral CA you'll clearly see at wide apertures easily correctable. Now I must admit, I’m not particularly into fisheye photography. Nor is a fisheye lens the first type of lens that I think of as being particularly compatible with Leica rangefinder cameras – especially if said fisheye doesn’t come with a viewfinder. In fact, to a degree, I do (or at least did) slightly question the sense of making a fisheye lens for m-mount cameras at all.
Performance wise, I'm pretty impressed. TL/DR - it's almost as good as the Olympus 8mm f1.8 - and I hold that lens in very high regard (it's certainly the best FE on the m43 format and there are a number of other credible options there, including a Panasonic/Leica version and one from Samyang that is well respected). Things of particular note about the TTArtisan: The bad news begins when you mount it on an M. TT Artisans left out rangefinder coupling. Therefore, if you have a film M, or a CCD digital M, you’ll have to guess your way to focus along hyperlocal lines. Even if your M does the live view or EVF thing, it renders the included framing finder pointless, not to mention, relies on the digital M’s terrible live view system. Yes, I understand that its field of view is too wide for the M’s focus/framing window. Yes, I understand that, as a super wide-angle fisheye lens, most things are in focus anyway. But a lens made for a mount should support the most basic function set of that mount. I am disappointed.
Customer reviews
Open full-size image in new tab. Same image at f/3.5 with 200% zoomed-in crop boxes showing star performance. Huge improvement in sharpness of stars in corners/edge. Still some chromatic abberation and coma, but not obtrusive. Open full-size image in new tab. 2 min. single exposure at f/4, ISO 1600, Canon EOS Ra, Bortle 3 sky. I haven’t used this one. In terms of weight and size it sits inbetween the aforementioned TTArtisan and this AstrHori.
Ok, so experiences out of the way, time for some practical thoughts on TTArtisan 11mm f/2.8 fisheye lens. There really is no denying that this lens is highly unconventional. It is designed for a system that – at least until the introduction of the M240 and M10/-P with their live view screens and add-on Visoflex viewfinders – is really quite unsuitable for fisheye photography. As far as I know, there is no optical view finder available for this lens, so short of fudging one out of a door peephole or the like, framing with this lens with most M-Mount cameras is going to be based on guesswork. Also longitudinal CA (including purple fringing) are corrected so well, they are hardly noticeable. AlternativesThere is one factor that makes the decision to add up though: quite simply, no one else makes one. At least as far as I know, TTArtisan are the only brand to have ever offered a fisheye lens for m-mount cameras. So if you’ve always had a craving for such a thing, the craving can now been answered…
Also similar to the Voigtlander UWA primes and some of the wide Laowa primes ( 12mm 2.8 and 15mm 2.0) this lens shows some slight green color cast in the corners which can become visible with bright skies. Sharpness infinity Unlike some of the other manufacturers from China AstrHori came up with its own casing design – without drawing a lot of inspiration from one of the competitors. When shot wide open at f/2.8 the old Canon 15mm was rife with coma at the corners. The Rokinon 12mm had less off-axis coma than the Canon but it was mixed with some astigmatism and softness. The TTArtisan had worse astigmatism than the Rokinon but crisper star images overall. Stopping down the lenses to f/4 improves the lenses’ performance but some astigmatism remains in the TTArtisan. Credit: Alan Dyer My first couple of shots were mostly an exercise in attempting to understand the specifications in practice. When you’re only used to shooting with lenses as wide as 18mm, having something with this field-of-view initially feels quite jarring. And that’s before you take into account the fact that it’s a fisheye optic. The TTArtisan 11mm fisheye isn’t rangefinder coupled either, so focusing took a moment to acclimatise to as well.Of course, at 11mm, essentially everything in front of you is in frame, so as long as you get the focus right – which again isn’t that hard at anything other than very close focus distances – you can’t really fail just pointing it vaguely in the right direction. Optical quality As far as I know only 3 different diagonal fish eye lenses designed for fulIframe sensors have been released yet (as of Dec. 2022): the 7Artisans 10mm 2.8, the TTArtisan 11mm 2.8 and this AstrHori 12mm 2.8. They are all similarly priced but their weight and dimensions differ noticeably. This AstrHori one is by far the biggest and heaviest, so I would also expect it to perform the best.
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