Meike 50mm T/2.1 Full Frame Cine Lens Announced

News

by Jeff LochJuly 17^th, 2020

Lens manufacturer Meike has just announced the first lens in its new FF-Prime Cine Series: the Meike 50mm T/2.1. With an image circle of 45mm, this lens covers Full Frame sensors, and it will be available in various lens mounts, including PL/EF/RF/E/L/Z mounts. Let’s take a closer look at it!

Image credit: Meike

Meike 50mm T/2.1 FF-Prime – Features

Chinese lens manufacturer Meike has been making affordable cinema lenses for Sony E-Mount, FUJIFILM X-Mount, and MFT cameras for quite some time now. We already reported about their Meike 35mm T/2.2 Cine lens in the past if you want to learn more about it.

Today, they released a new prime lens: the Meike 50mm T/2.1. This lens is the company’s first lens compatible with Full Frame cameras, which is part of their new FF-Prime Cine series. Indeed,  this 50mm T/2.1 features a wide image circle of 45mm. For example, for Panasonic S1H, RED Komodo, and Canon EOS R5 shooters, this lens will easily cover full-frame 6K/8K resolutions.

Image credit: Meike

The housing of the Meike 50mm T/2.1 is entirely made out of aluminum, for a weight of 1100 grams/2.42 lbs. Also, it is a relatively long lens with a length of 102.4mm in PL Mount.

The lens has industry-standard 0.8mm pitch gears on the focus and aperture ring. The focus ring has an extremely long 330° focus throw of the focus ring.

The Meike 50mm T/2.1 will be available in various lens mounts, including PL Mount, Canon EF and RF mounts, Nikon Z Mount, Sony E-Mount, and Panasonic L-Mount. At the moment, the lens mount is not user-interchangeable, but we’ve been told that Meike has plans to make it available depending on users’ requests.

Image credit: Meike

Meike 50mm T/2.1 FF-Prime – Lens Design

The lens design of the Meike 50mm T/2.1 FF-Prime consists of twelve elements in eight groups. The aperture mechanism consists of eleven aperture blades. The minimum focus distance is 60cm.

The outside diameter of the lens is 85mm, which is cinema standard and should work with most clamp-on matte boxes. Also, you can screw filters directly to the lens, thanks to an 82mm filter thread.

Image credit: Meike

Price and Availability

The Meike 50mm T/2.1 FF-Prime is currently in the pre-order stage for $959.00. It should start shipping in September. This price-point is aggressive from Meike, and the low price makes it one of the most affordable 50mm full-frame cinema lenses available on the market right now. For more information and pre-order it, please visit Meike’s website here.

What do you think about the Meike 50mm T/2.1 FF-Prime Cine lens? Did you ever shoot with Meike lenses in the past? Let us know in the comments below!