Brightin Star has put its 50mm F2 Tri-Sight on sale in its own online shop, roughly seven months after showing the lens at the CP+ trade fair in Yokohama. It is a manual full-frame prime offered in Sony E, Nikon Z, Canon RF and L-Mount versions, and its selling point is unusual: instead of hiding optical aberrations, it offers three positions that deliberately use them.
Besides the aperture and focus rings there is a third ring marked Smooth, Prime and Foams. Turning it shifts a lens group inside the barrel, changing how spherical aberration and astigmatism are corrected. Smooth undercorrects spherical aberration for softer contours and smoother out-of-focus areas, aimed at portraits; Prime is the neutral, conventional setting; Foams overcorrects, giving out-of-focus highlights pronounced edges — the bubble bokeh familiar from lenses such as the Trioplan. The catch is that changing modes also shifts the plane of focus, so shooters must refocus after switching; three separately marked distance scales on the barrel help.
Just in front of the mount the lens takes drop-in bokeh masks. Four shapes ship in the box — butterfly, star, triangle and clover — which reshape the outline of point light sources that fall out of focus. A screw-on retaining ring is meant to keep an insert from working loose and falling towards the sensor. The masks are most visible at wide apertures with clear separation between subject and background, and they affect the shape of the blur circles rather than acting as a filter over the whole frame.
Optically the Tri-Sight uses seven elements in six groups. Its eleven-blade aperture is stepless between f/2.0 and f/22, there is no autofocus, the minimum focus distance is 0.7 metres and the front filter thread is an unusual 37.5 millimetres. A retractable lens hood is built into the metal barrel. Depending on the mount, the lens weighs between 429 and 454 grams at a length of 70 to 74 millimetres, and a detachable focus lever is included — useful for video, where the stepless aperture and the lever allow quiet changes during a take, provided focus is corrected at the same moment as the rendering mode.
Brightin Star currently lists the lens at around $350, with a regular price just under $400; the bundle with a matching 37.5 mm protective filter costs $370 instead of $435. There is no German price recommendation on the US product page, and availability appears to vary by channel: the manufacturer's own shop lists the lens as orderable, while US retailer B&H still shows the Sony E version at $350 as a new item awaiting delivery, taking pre-orders.
