Vazen 50mm T2.1

• Anamorphic Lens by Vazen
• Single Focus : Linear Compensator
• Mount: PL, EF

The 50mm is Vazen’s second lens in their full frame line up, following the 85mm I reviewed in September of 2020.

That’s the mindblowing fact right there. I’m shooting at 50mm open gate on the S1H, with 1.8x compression. So this feels a lot wider than a “regular’ 50mm in video mode. The nearest option to this kind of coverage in anamorphic lenses are Cooke’s 1.8X Anamorphic /i , at roughly 35 thousand dollars. And before you try to argue for DIY setups, I can’t clear 50mm open gate using the famous Kowa B&H!

Shooting with the Vazen 50mm was *NOT* as easy as I thought, and that was mostly because 50mm on open gate is really wide, so I had a hard time nailing focus. The setup is also heavy and I thought I could wing it handheld. It was not as smooth as I hoped. These challenges are more of newbie mistakes of me than the lens’ fault.

Looking at the this 50mm’s construction, I see a lot of similarities with the 85mm, which is good, but I also see Vazen has addressed lots of notes on it, like the font choices, overall text design and - most importantly - the markings are now in feet and inches instead of the previous fractions of feet. Good job there! They also got rid of that carbon fiber accent at the front that we had on the 85mm, which looked pretty odd. They didn’t, however, flatten this bubbly lens cap that makes the lens wobbly when you place it facing down. Sad.

As you’d expect in a cinema lens, iris and focus rings are geared and offer a nice resistance. Focus throw is around 120 degrees and minimum focus sits at 1.1m or 3 foot 6. Iris goes from T16 to T2.1 and depth of field just feels shallower when shooting on the open gate mode since the image is so large.

The front has a diameter of 95mm for clip-on matteboxes and you get 86mm filter threads.

The lens weighs 1.5kg, or 3.5lbs, which is not that heavy. When I throw it on the S1H, this still looks like a small setup, but is actually pretty hefty to lug around.

The lens comes with a hard case, with a PL mount and an additional EF mount and some shims so you can use it on different cameras.

While the lens is pretty sharp when you get it right, I feel critical focus is pretty hard to nail down without an external monitor.

On the flare field, this 50mm matches the rest of the Vazen set, with nice blue streaks that show up rather easily and feel good. I also noticed some white-ish streaks on the sides, so I went investigating. In this shot, these streaks are actually reflections from a window outside of the frame, as you can see here. If I block the left side of the frame, the reflections disappear. I don’t think this is intentional, or what exactly is causing it, but I can see complaints about it. I enjoy it though.

For coverage, if you got a sharp eye, you might’ve noticed the aspect ratio of this episode is a bit wider than usual, and that is because I’m shooting everything 6K Open Gate 3:2 with the 50mm, which yields a 2.7:1 aspect ratio. Unusual, yes, undesirable? Definitely not. I can easily crop down to 2.39:1.

Distortion is an awkward thing. On the real world tests, I didn’t feel it as much, but when we were shooting a couple samples for the Cookbook, the bulging was very noticeable. It really depends on the type of camera move you’re doing, and the objects around you - organic stuff, like trees and flowers are more likely to not look warped when compared to walls, for example. Also, this much distortion can be easily fixed in post!

Did I say this thing feels super wide on full frame? I wanted to shoot it all at minimum focus, because that’s when you get the extra vibe of how shallow depth of field is here, but the tiny camera screen and the strong squeeze factor required an external monitor that I wasn’t carrying on the day I shot the tests. Definitely something for a next shoot!

The Vazen 50mm is a unique offering. It’s definitely NOT cheap, but we’re starting to get to lenses I’d love to have for my regular shoots. I’d use this over Sirui in a heartbeat, but then, can I justify paying ten Sirui lenses for this one lens?

One more cool thing I can do with this lens is mount it sideways on the camera, for portrait-mode shooting on Open Gate, and then desqueeze to 6:5 aspect ratio. It’s a little bit wider than a square, and the picture feels huge. It’s super annoying to deal with desqueeze on set for this though...