The Thypoch Simmer 28mm lens caught my attention because it is unlike any other lenses manufactured recently. It looks special from the outside, it packs unique focusing features and aim to deliver an image quality that compete with expensive Leica lenses.

In this blog I am writing about my first thoughts, my impressions after using this Thypoch Simera 28mm f1.4 a few times while showing you what I got during my first outings with the lens. They recently released their 28 and 35mm Simera lenses for a lot of lens mounts like the Sony E, Nikon Z and I got mine for the Fujifilm X, pairing it to my Fuji X-E4.

Lens features

It’s a Manual focus lens with zone some focus features that really stand out from what I have seen before. These little dots that come and go depending on your F-stop giving you clues about your depth of field with the current settings. It is not something that other lenses are not capable of, they have their own scale system that gives you the same info but I really love this one It is playful, easy to use and on a design stand point it looks awesome. I won’t gonna lie, I am not a manual lens or vintage lens expert but from what I have heard and read this one is very accurate in terms of distance scale. So for someone like me with little experience it is good to pick up on zone focus and practicing it with a tool, with a lens that is accurate and consistent that will help you get positive results.

Image quality

I haven’t shot a ton of photos with this lens so far but still I have some street images and more countryside natures shots. I love working with the file coming out of the x-e4 taken through this thypoch lens. Of course one part is due to the camera body and the sensor but I feel like the lens also has something special. It is a technically good lens in terms of sharpness, flare and all that. The colors are also very natural. it is not that vintage heavy character lens but the images I get with it do not look like any fuji lenses I used on my x-e4 before. Very nice color rendition and micro contrast. The photos are sharp and crispy and give plenty of freedom for editing.

Price

They made it to offer a cheaper alternative to expensive Leica lenses. If we compare the price of both they are significantly cheaper but it is not a cheap lens by any means. Retailing at USD 699 some would think it is expensive for a manual focus lens and I would agree with that. So far I only used cheap manual focus lenses which can be a good entry point into this kind of lenses but being that cheap they are also made in consequence so it is not uncommon to have questionable image quality, bad looking flare and inaccurate focus scales. This is quite frustrating when you play with those and get a nice image that you would have liked to get on a better lens. The Thypoch lens had none of this. It is a premium lens with a premium price but you can be assured that if your image lacks something it will not be the lens fault.

Manual focusing technique

Being not an experienced manual focus lens user I tried focus peaking first to help me. It is really not something I would recommend. Even though I chose the settings that is supposed to be more sensitive and more accurate it would still make me think that I am pin point in focus but I am not. I ditched the focus peaking and I use a custom button to punch in to check that I am in focus. Otherwise was shooting street using the zone focus technique. With enough light I set the lens to f8 and mostly point and shoot. I start to build the muscle memory and getting better at focusing at 2m or 3m without looking at the lens. I know that when the tab is right in the center of the lens I am focusing at 2m and when making a short move to the left I am at 3m. If I can shoot at f8 this gives me plenty depth of field to have my subject in focus but it is still work in progress. I think my focus distance was correct but my shutter speed was not fast enough on some pictures which led to motion blur rather than out of focus images.

I will keep on shooting more with the lens, hopefully taking nice pictures. If not I even though those were only first impressions, I would be the one to blame because this lens seems to on the premium side of the spectrum. After more time using the lens I will probably do another, more long term review. In the meantime thanks for reading this blog. Don’t forget to got out and shoot, see ya!

Sample images