Yongnuo 35mm Prime Lens – A Review

Wow, I thought, when researching to buy a 35mm prime for my Canon 70D / Black Magic Ursa 4K. Wow – it’s cheap! Cheap as chips. Bargin. £76.62 of your Earth pennies. Much much MUCH cheaper than any Canon equivalent! Could it really BE that bad? What could possibly go wrong?

Er. Well. It broke. Pretty quickly. But worse, it locked itself to the body of my Canon 70D (thankfully, not the body of the Black Magic Ursa!). Something broke internally and the Yongnuo, in its death throes, decided to take my Canon with it.

Now, I’m not a camera expert, but have been using Nikon and Canon lenses for ooooh about 16 years. I’ve never had one break on me before. Which is probably why this Yongnuo YN35mm F2 lens was a banana. Well, it was certainly a monkey. I certainly had to use my monkey skills to get the damned thing from my Canon. That was a tense moment…..

I tried to get a return number from Amazon, but as usual, Amazon’s labyrinthine menu system and desire to not give you a refund soon revealed I was past some kind of three month return period. Bottom. Thanks Amazon. You’re just great.

So, I thought, easy! Go to the horse’s mouth. Yongnuo!

I emailed them three months ago. Still no response. I said if they didn’t respond, I might just write a little review about their candle holder, cough, lens. And it’s lack of build quality. And it’s desire to bork any camera body it’s attached to. But no. They declined to comment. Actually, that’s not true, they didn’t decline to comment – they simply ignored me. So much for customer care and warranty periods!

So, comrades, if you want to purchase a rubbish lens with the build quality of a cheap Chinese plastic  toy, go for it. And you, too, could be the proud owner of a rather swanky and, I have to say, sexily unique candle holder.

Score: 0/5