I received both the 35mm and 50mm on Saturday. I'm surprised how solid and well built they feel. To make these lenses at this price point we need to thank the enormous advances in manufacturing that China has made over the last 20 years. The lenses are sharp, but with some strange breathing / distortion effects as you adjust focus. Setting aside the 1.33x squeeze, these lenses are basically like the Bausch & Lomb 'Block' CinemaScope lenses with synchronised focus introduced in 1954, but made with modern materials and manufacturing methods. http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingcs5.htm
(Trivia, I believe these lenses were first used for Broken Lance released in September 1954: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046808/ )
It took ~60 years for something that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and manufacture to be made for ~$650. I just wish the squeeze was 1.5X instead of 1.33X.
The cool thing about these lenses isn't just the lenses but the promise for the future. Hopefully other companies realise there is a market for under $1000 anamorphic lenses and we get more competition and perhaps other companies running crowd funding campaigns for 1.5X, 1.8X, or even 2X lenses. I'm surprised that SLR Magic hasn't considered this possibility. Surely other companies are looking at the fact SIRUI has now raised over US$3 million across two Indiegogo campaigns and are thinking they may have something to offer that is even better.
Surely there's a Panavision optical engineer who in his or her spare time who could run a crowd sourcing campaign for a a set of 2X lenses based on their own design, but with manufacturing in China. 🙂