A Manual 50mm That Switches Between Clean, Soft, and Bubbly

The Brightin Star 50mm f/2 Tri-Sight is a manual-focus lens that puts three different optical personalities behind one turning ring, so you can switch between a clean normal lens and two softer, bubblier looks without changing glass. If you shoot a full frame mirrorless body and keep reaching for filters, plug-ins, or adapted old lenses to break up the clinical look of modern optics, a lens like this raises a fair question about whether one barrel can cover all of it.

Metal is everywhere on this lens. Andrei Dima tested the Brightin Star 50mm f/2 Tri-Sight on a 24-megapixel Nikon Zf and found the mount, focus ring, aperture ring, mode ring, and integrated hood all made of metal, with smooth, well-damped movement throughout. The mode ring stays put once you choose a setting, and the focus throw is long enough to make manual focusing easy. The filter setup is unusual. The thread is 37.5 mm, a size you won't find on most store shelves, and it sits on the middle element instead of the outer barrel. Rotating the mode ring pushes that element forward, so a filter mounted on the larger outer edge would collide with it. At 454 g in the Z mount version and around 420 g on other mounts, the lens carries more weight than a compact manual 50mm usually does.

Smooth, Prime, and Foam are the three settings. Prime behaves like a regular lens and delivers the best image quality. Smooth softens the image along with the background blur, and Foam goes softer still while producing the ring-edged, soap bubble highlights that usually require a specialty lens. Each mode has its own focus scale under the focus ring, and switching modes nudges the focus plane, so you have to refocus after every change. Minimum focus distance shifts too, landing at 80 cm in Prime and 90 cm in the other two. The box also includes shaped plates that mount at the rear, letting you turn out-of-focus highlights into stars or a triangle, plus a tool to install them. Inside, the lens uses seven elements in six groups and 11 aperture blades.

Variable rendering in a single lens has a long history. Nikon's AF DC-Nikkor 105mm f/2D and 135mm f/2D used a separate Defocus Control ring to adjust spherical aberration, which let portrait shooters tune how the foreground or background blur looked. The soap bubble look comes from the same family of optical behavior: older triplet designs such as the Meyer-Optik Görlitz Trioplan built a following because undercorrected spherical aberration leaves bright rims around out-of-focus highlights. Moving an internal element, as the Tri-Sight does, is a way to dial that aberration in and out on demand, and the softness in Smooth and Foam is the cost of that effect. A practical way to use it is to treat Prime as your default and switch only when a scene has point light sources or busy backgrounds that benefit from the effect. The Zf suits this kind of glass, with focus peaking, magnified view, and in-body stabilization that works with manual lenses once you enter the focal length in the camera's non-CPU lens data menu.

For video, the lens has moderate focus breathing, so a rack focus will visibly shift your framing. Color is where Dima was most impressed, calling the rendering superb for both stills and video and well suited to anyone after a vintage, cinematic look, and he gravitated toward street photography with it for that reason. In Prime mode at f/2, the center and midframe are decently sharp with good contrast, while the corners are soft and slightly dark. Stopping down improves things quickly, and the sample images show exactly which aperture brings the corners together. Flares from strong light sources change character from one mode to the next, and the sunstars, close-focus sharpness, and how the softer modes behave as you stop down all get their own test shots.

The side-by-side samples in the video above show how far apart Smooth, Prime, and Foam really look.

Get more Fstoppers in your Google feed: follow us on Google, and add us as a preferred source in Search.