7Artisans Sells a 135mm F1.8 for $689 and Canon RF Owners Still Can't Buy One
I bought into Canon on purpose. Not once — twice. The R8 for full frame, the R100 for the days I want something I won’t cry about dropping. I like Canon’s color science, I like where Canon puts its buttons, and I have defended the RF system in conversations where defending it made me look like a hostage. Nobody tricked me into this mount. I walked in.
So understand that what follows isn’t brand tribalism. It’s the specific complaint of someone who already paid.
7Artisans is shipping an autofocus 135mm F1.8 for full frame. Six hundred and eighty-nine dollars. Sony E, Nikon Z, L mount.
Not RF. Not “RF coming later.” Not RF.
The Lens Exists. It Just Refuses to Point at My Camera.
This isn’t a plastic novelty with a focus motor glued on. Sixteen elements in thirteen groups, six of them ED glass, five high-refractive-index. Twelve aperture blades, which is where the round bokeh comes from. Minimum focus at 0.68m for a quarter-life-size magnification, an 82mm filter thread, a metal barrel with a sealing gasket at the mount, USB-C firmware updates, two function buttons, a physical AF/MF switch, and a clicked aperture ring on the E and L versions. It weighs about a kilogram, which is what honest glass at this focal length and aperture weighs.
Canon’s answer to that focal length is the RF 135mm F1.8L IS USM. It’s a magnificent lens. It’s also two thousand and ninety-nine dollars at list, and the internet’s cheerful street price of around nineteen-seventy is still nineteen-seventy.
Three times the money. On a mount I chose.
And here’s the part that turns irritation into anger: the reason I can’t buy the cheap one has nothing to do with optics, physics, flange distance, or my camera’s ability to drive a stepping motor. The R8 would focus that lens fine. The barrier is a contract I’m not a party to.
Ask Who the Closed Mount Is Protecting
Canon started licensing RF to Sigma and Tamron in 2024, and the licensing covers APS-C. Crop only. Two years on, full-frame third-party autofocus for RF is still a rumor category — off-brand names surfacing in Vietnamese storefronts, Samyang doing careful little releases, Yongnuo operating in whatever gray zone Yongnuo operates in.
Canon’s executives get asked about this at every show, and the answers are masterpieces of saying nothing. At CP+ this year the line was essentially that the ball is in Sigma’s court. Last time around it was that the contents of contracts are being decided within business strategy. Read those two sentences back to back and try to find a photographer in them.
So run the test. Who does the wall protect?
It doesn’t protect me — I’m the one paying the difference. It doesn’t protect image quality, because the licensed APS-C third-party glass is fine and everyone knows it. It doesn’t protect the R8 from a bad experience, because the same 7Artisans design already works on a Z8 and an S5II with published compatibility tables. What it protects is the price of the L series. That’s the whole answer. Every other explanation is a press-conference noise.
Nikon opened Z. Sony opened E years ago and now has the deepest cheap-fast-glass ecosystem in the industry, which is precisely why a Chinese optics house builds for E first and thinks about everyone else second. Canon looked at that and decided the moat was worth more than the customers standing outside it.
What the L Lens Actually Buys, Because I’m Not Going to Lie About It
The Canon has optical stabilization — around five and a half stops on its own, more when it coordinates with a body that has IBIS. My R8 doesn’t have IBIS, so that stabilization isn’t a luxury for me, it’s the difference between handholding at dusk and not. The 7Artisans has none. The Canon focuses with Nano USM, which is a different animal from a stepping motor when a subject is moving toward you. It’s fully weather sealed rather than gasketed at the mount. It’s actually lighter, at 935 grams against roughly 1014.
If someone hands me both and tells me one is free, I take the L. Obviously.
But that was never the choice. The choice is a lens I can afford this year against a lens I can afford in some imaginary year, and Canon has arranged things so that the affordable option simply doesn’t exist in my mount. I’m not owed a cheap 135. I’m annoyed that I’m not allowed one.
What I still won’t do is switch. I have RF glass, I know these bodies, and rebuying a system out of spite is how you end up with less gear and the same feelings. Canon is counting on exactly that math, and Canon is right, and knowing they’re right is somehow the worst part.
The lens is $689. My mount just isn’t on the list.