The HyperPrime does have the unique personality and gave nice out-of-camera color. I knew it wouldn’t be as sharp as Lumix or Nokton.

It has 15cm min focus distance where its barrel is much longer than the 14mm pancake. Since the front element can get much closer to a subject, I was intrigued by close shots from it.

The distortion from long shots seemed just fine, but there seemed too much perspective distortion from close shots. At the end of the day, I decided to return it. But not much bad thing to say about this lens. Very nice OOC color. For candid stuff, it needed no color correction.

I recieved my second copy of the lens the middle of last week and it is much better than the first one. It focuses to inifinity and has no vingetting when stopped down.

I find the softness to be acceptable though as @vicharris is pointing out, if there is enough light to shoot at f2.5 then the Panny 14 mm with the WA converter would be cheaper, smaller and sharper. Given that I had to pay to ship the defective first copy of the lens back to SLR Magic, the actual price of this lens isn't that much under what you can find the Olympus m.zuiko 12 mm lens going for new on ebay and that lens is sharper at f2 and smaller. Given that the SLR Magic 12 mm really doesn't perform well at aperatures less than T2 (it gets a sort of milky haze), I am having some second thoughts(perhaps more like thrid, fourth or fifth thoughts) about buying this lens.

Given the quality control problems that SLR Magic seems to have I can't imagine buying another of their "premium" Noktor lenses - particularly as the others seem to compete directly with excellent Voigtlander glass of similar or lesser price.

Never mind about the flare. I saw the crazy flare at night. Haha.

@vicharris Only one SLRMagic lens is enough for me. Why not Nokton 25mm 0.95? It's as sharp as 20mm 1.7 at f4.

@IvanUskokovic I sold my FD lens, too.

@jleo Yeap Yeap 77mm filter worked for me, too.

@stonebat Good to hear they have a decent batch there at Adorama. I was going to walk on over to the store in pick one up today, but - ended up coming across a gentleman selling me some fine Canon FD lenses. He took all my money.

If anybody (locally in NYC) wants to buy either a Canon FD 24mm f/2.0 or Canon FD 85mm f/1.2L lens to fund my purchase of a SLR Magic 12mm T1.6...message me.

Adorama has it in stock, and I decided to try it out. Low risk since Adorama's refund policy is nice. Plus 4% cashback through mrrebates.com.

http://www.adorama.com/SLR1216MFT.html

They have the latest batch units. The focus ring rotates counterclockwise like Canon FD. The mount has almost no play. Smooth focus ring. Tight aperture ring. Most of all the flare at max aperture looks better than earlier reviews. Instead of the crazy flare, I'm getting a few of thin sine wave like flares on corners at certain angles. It goes away past f/2. Sharp enough at f/2.8. Good sharpness at f/4 and f/5.6. The infinity focus is slightly past the mark.

The bottom line. I like.

@vicharris, you can order one at:

http://www.hondogarage.com/index.php/product/landing/follow-focus

You'll need the gear attachment which is $10 more.

I've now attached it to my gini cage rig, and adjusted the rails so there's even more range, basically the lens is all that's stopping it from going all the way around. Pictures coming next!

@fosterchen Is there a place to buy that FF right now? Looks perfect for the SLR since it's so small and out of the way. A full size FF is just to much.

@CrazyPete there is no vignetting that I see so far in video mode, but I haven't tested all the photo modes, which I'm thinking probably will have some. Maybe outdoors stopped down I'll see some, but it doesn't bother me that much for my purposes. This is a regular 58mm UV filter that I just put on for testing use, since I have an extra Canon cap that fits this nicely...no more screw on cap! I'll try to do a better example of a focus pull from infinity to macro!

@CrazyPete Thanks! It seems to be working well. I'm heading to panasonic tomorrow to test it out on their af100's. They seemed to be pretty impressed with the lens at Cine Gear. Also, I found a $8 step-up ring, 58-77 that works fine for my ND. Here's the link

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005R4QHFG/ref=oh_details_o04_s00_i00

There's no way we should be paying $50-$80 for this thing!

@vicharris I like your video and I'm glad the lens is working well for you. It seems like it should be a good low light lens.

@fosterchen I'm glad I was able to help. That looks like it will work well. I notice that you have a filter on there with out any step up ring, do you see any vignetting?

Here's a little piece I put together trying to push the SLR Lens to it's limits at night. I never went higher than ISO1200 and was set on Nostalgic -2,-2,0,-2 and 3200 WB. I was changing the aperture so I can't give that but never went above 5.6. Just a little bit of CC when I was under horrid fluorescent lighting to lessen the green nastiness. Think I'm starting to like it!