Lumix S 35mm F1.8
£579/$597
Looks like an ordinary prime at an ordinary price, but there’s more to it than that
1 The autofocus is both fast and silent, which makes it effective for video work.
2 The Lumix S 35mm f/1.8 has a functional design. There’s an AF/MF switch, a focus ring, and that’s it.
3 The Lumix S 35mm f/1.8 weighs just 295g, despite its metal rear mounting plate and weather sealing.
w w w.panasonic.com
Ultra-fast f/1.4 and f/1.2 prime lenses are headline-grabbing ‘dream’ optics for most of us, but the U Lumix S 35mm F1.8 lives in a more affordable and practical world and doesn’t carry quite the same glamour. And yet a 35mm f/1.8 prime is a handy lens to have, not just for classic street photography but environmental portraits, too. Modest as it is, the Lumix S 35mm F1.8 is amongst the best L-mount lenses right now. We tested it on the Panasonic Lumix S5 IIX, one of the best Panasonic cameras in the range and one of the best cameras for filmmakers.
Of course, Panasonic has half an eye on the video and content creation market and what’s interesting about this lens is not just its individual capabilities, but the fact it’s one of a set of four f/1.8 primes that are practically identical in size and weight. These include a Lumix S 24mm F1.8, this lens, a Lumix S 50mm F1.8 and a Lumix S 85mm F1.8. Stills photographers might pick a couple of primes from this list but content creators might be keen to grab all four, as they can be quickly swapped out without really changing the weight or balance of your video rig.
The Lumix S 35mm F1.8 has some other notable features. It’s dust- and splash-resistant for a start, which you don’t always get at this price, it has a sophisticated optical construction designed to suppress focus breathing and it offers smooth aperture/iris changes while filming. Is this a glamorous lens? No. Is it effective and practical, though? Absolutely.
Build & handling
The Lumix S 35mm F1.8 is an extremely plain and unassuming lens, even to the point of looking rather basic. There’s no aperture ring, no focus distance scale, no customisable function buttons or control ring. Image stabilisation is handled by the camera body, so there’s no switch for this either. In fact, the only switch you get is for AF/MF selection.
There’s nothing wrong with that necessarily. Many photographers will be used to controlling lens functions from the camera body, and this works well here. In manual focus mode, for example, a magnified section at the centre of the screen gives you focus precision, while the on-screen focus distance scale is probably a good deal more accurate than physical scales on today’s short-throw AF lenses. The manual focus action is slightly stiff but that’s probably for the best as it makes accidental focus changes less likely.
There’s no ape
