Three Budget 85mm Lenses, One Clear Winner, and a Surprise Runner-Up

Cheap 85mm lenses can look like an easy win until you start noticing the tradeoffs: size, focus behavior, background rendering, and how hard you have to work in post. If you shoot portraits on Sony E mount, this comparison matters because small differences at 85mm show up fast in faces, hair, and specular highlights.

Coming to you from Dustin Abbott, this methodical video puts three budget 85mm primes head-to-head: the Viltrox AF 85mm F2.0 EVO FE, the Meike 85mm F1.8 Pro, and the Meike 85mm F1.8 SE Mark II. Abbott starts where you actually live with a lens: price, size, weight, and controls. One of these comes in at $230, and the gap up to $340 is big enough to change what else you can buy that month. You also get a clear reality check on what “compact” means here, down to diameter, length, and filter size, which affects everything from packing to what filters you already own. The feature differences are not subtle, either, especially if you care about tactile control while shooting video.

The build section gets interesting when Abbott shifts from specs to usability. One lens has the kind of extras you normally expect to pay more for, including an aperture ring that can be clicked or de-clicked, plus a custom button and an AF/MF switch. Another keeps it basic, and Abbott is blunt about which one feels like it left features on the table. Then he flips the conversation with a detail that changes how backgrounds look: aperture blade count, where one option jumps to 11 blades while the others stick to nine. He also calls out close-focus numbers and magnification, and flags a mismatch you should watch for: a lens can focus closer on paper but still disappoint at minimum distance in real images.

Autofocus is where a lot of comparisons get messy, and Abbott keeps it clean. All three use stepping motors, and he reports that speed differences are small enough to be hard to call in normal use. The video tests matter more than the headline, though, because he walks through tracking behavior as he moves toward the camera, steps out of frame, and returns, the kind of scenario that exposes hesitation and reacquisition problems. He also grades video pulls and focus breathing, and this is one of the places where the “cheap lens” compromises show up in a way you will notice in clips, not charts. One lens breathes more than the other two, and he treats that as a real negative instead of a trivia point.

Image quality is where the rankings stop being polite. Abbott picks a winner for bokeh circles and portrait backgrounds, and it is not the lens you might assume if you only chase sharpness. He also separates fringing from general sharpness, which is useful because you can tolerate one and hate the other depending on how you shoot. Then he gets into sharpness and contrast, and he describes one lens as simply operating at a different level across the frame, even when another is stopped down to match aperture. There is also a light transmission twist that complicates the “f/2 versus f/1.8” argument, plus distortion and vignette correction numbers that hint at how much work your files may need before delivery. Check out the video above for the full rundown from Abbott.