A few weeks ago we published a story about a creative photographer who constructed a real camera lens from scratch, with material costs totalling less than $10. There were, however, some drawbacks. You'd need a fairly obscure medium format film camera in order to use the lens, and obviously the build would take a lot of time and effort to complete.
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But now it seems you can have a lens that's almost as cheap, ready-made, and even compatible with multiple common camera mounts. For the princely sum of just $22 (converted from the original 159 Yuan), Chinese lens manufacturer Caye will sell you a 200mm f/3.5 full-frame telephoto lens, compatible with Sony E, Canon RF, Canon EF, Canon EF-M, Nikon Z, Nikon F, Fuji X, and M43 mounts. The lens measures 32cm long with a 14cm maximum diameter, it tips the scales at 550g, and it has a minimum focus distance of 1.8m - nothing too unusual there.
Of course, a lens this cheap is bound to have some pretty huge compromises: focussing is manual only, it's highly unlikely there are any electrical contents for lens-body communication, and the aperture is fixed at f/3.5. That's actually quite large for such a long lens, but we'd wager this could have a profound negative impact on corner sharpness. The limited information we have on the lens also says it uses only "a set of two optical structures". With such a basic optical path, sharpness is likely to be low, and distortion and fringing high.
But to dwell on conventional lens quality metrics is missing the point here. This isn't meant to be a serious optic that'd ace our lab tests, rather it's just a fun, creative and cheap tool for experimentation; something that's backed up by the lens's manufacturer apparently being known for producing fun lenses.
We don't yet have any details of where you can actually buy the Caye 200mm f/3.5 outside of China, but it doesn't usually take long for products like this to pop up on the likes of AliExpress and Temu.
Story credit: SonyAlphaRumors
