The TTArtisan AF 23mm f/1.8 at the Osaka Expo

Out of Camera #7

Welcome back to Multicore.

Here’s something new for Out of Camera: a mirrorless camera lens. This time I’m sharing some photos taken with the TTArtisan AF 23mm f/1.8 over at Expo 2025 in Osaka this past weekend.

TTArtisan is quite a new company — it only started in 2019 in Shenzhen and now makes a range of inexpensive lenses for Canon, Sony, Nikon, Fujifilm and Micro Four Thirds cameras. I’ve used a few third-party lenses from Chinese companies in the past, but they tended to be manual focus; TTArtisan, on the other hand, has picked up a lot of attention for its autofocus range.

This 23mm f/1.8 was first released this year for Fujifilm’s X-Mount and sells for just $127. It has a fully metal build and is electronically controlled; I used it on my X-Pro2 (nine years on, still somehow the world’s greatest digital camera) and it even automatically displayed accurate 35mm-equivalent framelines in the optical viewfinder.

Although the combination doesn’t exactly get you to X100-level compactness, this is still a pretty manageable lens. It’s more in the ballpark of the 27mm f/1.7 lens on the Leica Q, though of course that covers a full-frame sensor. Here’s an official shot of how it looks on an X-Pro3:

A well-built, reasonably compact, fast 35mm-equivalent AF prime for $127? Surely there’s a catch? Well, look at the photos and see for yourself. These are all out-of-camera JPEGs shot with Fujifilm’s Astia film simulation.