Brightin Star 9mm F5.6 9mm

The Brightin Star 9mm F5.6 gives you an absurdly wide 132-degree view with almost no distortion, which is its only real party trick. Optical quality is a weak spot, and the slow f/5.6 aperture limits its usefulness. It's worth a look only if you find it at the low end of its price range and know exactly why you need that extreme width.

That 132-degree view is the star of the show. It's incredibly wide, and the near-zero distortion claim mostly holds up, giving you dramatic, straight-line perspectives that a fisheye would ruin. The 10-point sunstars from the 5-blade aperture are a nice touch for night scenes. But sharpness is a real mixed bag. Our optical score lands in the bottom quarter of lenses we track, and customer feedback confirms corners stay soft even when stopped down. The built-in hood helps with flare, but you'll need to nail focus manually, and the f/5.6 max aperture means this thing is hungry for light.

Stacked against the competition, the Brightin Star is in a tough spot. The Sony E 11mm F1.8 is sharper, faster, and has autofocus, but it's APS-C only and not nearly as wide. A zoom like the Tamron 17-70mm f/2.8 is vastly more versatile and practical for most shooters. Even the Sigma 28-70mm f/2.8 will run circles around this lens in image quality and usability. You only pick the Brightin Star if you absolutely need that 132-degree rectilinear look and are willing to sacrifice pretty much everything else to get it.

Pricing for this lens is all over the map, with a wild spread from $400 to over $7,700 across vendors. At the low end, you're getting a unique, ultra-wide perspective that's hard to find elsewhere for full-frame Sony. At the high end, it's an absolute joke. If you can snag it closer to that $400 mark, it's a fun specialty tool. Just know you're trading optical quality for that extreme field of view.

The Brightin Star 9mm F5.6 is a weird one. It's an ultra-wide prime for full-frame Sony E-mount cameras that delivers a massive 132-degree field of view with almost no fisheye distortion. That's genuinely impressive for a lens this wide. But it's also a manual focus only lens with a slow f/5.6 aperture, which immediately limits who it's for. Think tripods, landscapes, and carefully composed architecture shots, not run-and-gun street photography.

Skip this if you need a sharp, general-purpose wide angle. The soft corners and manual focus make it a poor fit for video run-and-gun or any situation where you need reliable image quality across the frame. If you want a fast aperture for astro or low light, look elsewhere because f/5.6 just won't cut it.

This is a one-trick pony, but it's a pretty cool trick. Buy it if you're a landscape or architecture shooter on a Sony full-frame body who specifically wants an ultra-wide, non-fisheye look and doesn't mind manual focus and a tripod. For everyone else, it's a hard pass.