Brightin Star 14mm f/2.8 Review: Shockingly Cheap, but Does It Deliver?

Ultrawide lenses used to cost a fortune. A full frame 14mm f/2.8 from Canon or Nikon ran around $1,500 just over a decade ago, which put serious glass out of reach for a lot of people. Budget manual focus alternatives have changed that equation, and the Brightin Star 14mm f/2.8 is one of the most affordable yet, coming in at around $279.

Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this thorough video puts the Brightin Star 14mm f/2.8 through its paces on a 61-megapixel Sony a7CR, which is about as unforgiving a test platform as you can find. The lens is available for Canon RF, Nikon Z, Leica L, and Sony E-mount systems, covers a full frame field of view, and has no electronic contacts, meaning no in-camera corrections. Frost notes the build quality is what you'd expect at this price: metallic, reasonably solid, no weather sealing, and a smooth if slightly heavy focus ring. It ships with a detachable metal hood and an 82mm filter thread, which is genuinely useful for attaching polarizing or ND filters, though Frost warns you'll need the thinnest filters you can find to avoid physical vignetting.

On the sharpness side, the center of the frame is impressively sharp wide open at f/2.8. The problem is the corners, which fall apart badly due to significant field curvature. Refocusing into the corners brings them back at f/2.8, but that's not how you'd typically shoot a wide angle lens. Stop down to f/5.6 or f/8 and the whole frame comes together well, but that field curvature at wider apertures is a real limitation for a lens this wide. Frost also found the flaring performance troubling: bright light sources produce large colored rings and reflections that don't disappear as you stop down, which is a meaningful drawback on a lens designed to take in a huge chunk of the scene.

Distortion is actually one of the brighter spots here, coming in surprisingly low for a 14mm optic. Vignetting is heavy at f/2.8 but improves by f/4 to f/5.6, then plateaus. Close-up sharpness is strong, with the lens focusing down to 20 cm. Coma is present at f/2.8 and f/4 but clears up at f/5.6. Sun stars appear as early as f/5.6 and get striking by f/8, though the flare issues become more visible alongside them. Bokeh is clean in character, but at 14mm on full frame, you're simply not going to get much subject separation regardless of aperture.

Frost lands in a clear place on this one: the field curvature and flaring are significant enough that he can't easily recommend it, though he notes it could serve a purpose for 4K video work in controlled lighting. Watch the full video above to see all the real-world sample images and hear Frost's complete breakdown of whether the tradeoffs are worth it at this price.