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Lenses

The Best Small Lens for the Panasonic LUMIX S9

Chris Gampat
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Last updated on 07/25/2025
09/03/2025
2 Mins read
A Lumix camera with a strap rests on a wooden surface in natural light.
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One of Panasonic’s coolest cameras is the LUMIX S9. But there aren’t many lenses out there that make the package seem very small. Sure, Sigma has a few contemporary primes, and LUMIX also has its 18-40mm zoom. But perhaps the single best small lens is the Bright Star 28mm f2.8 adapted to the camera body. Not only does it make the entire package so small and portable, but it’s also basically a budget Leica setup.

So why is this lens so good? Well, it’s the smallest and lightest pancake lens on the market for the Leica M-mount camera system. And when you adapt it to Leica L-mount, it remains to be almost as small as it is on M-mount cameras. In addition to that, it’s got a softer look with character and vibes that everyone is going to love. Embracing the Real Time LUT feature that LUMIX cameras also gives is an extra bonus. All you’ll have to do is manually focus. And more specifically, you’re most likely going to zone focus with this lens. If you wanted, however, to carefully manually focus it, you surely could.

When I reviewed this lens, I found the image quality to be muted, classical, and sharp without being overly so, etc. But to be frank, I didn’t want to use it all that often on the Leica SL2s. However, with the LUMIX S9, I’d want to use it all the time because of the size and how the camera and body become a pair of lovebirds.

When Reviews Editors Alberto Lima reviewed some beautiful LUTs for Panasonic cameras, he used the Brightin Star a whole lot and adored the image quality.

At this point I sound like a broken record. So let me just list it out:

  • The Panasonic S9 is a small camera without weather sealing. It’s got the body of a point and shoot in some ways
  • It goes best when paired with an equally small lens
  • In this case, you need a pancake lens. But L Mount doesn’t have any made by the three big lens makers for the system that cover full-frame sensors completely.
  • The Brightin Star 28mm f2.8 is one of the smallest Leica M-mount lenses around and it’s affordable. The M mount is very versatile and lenses for it can pretty much be adapted to any modern mirrorless camera body.
  • You’ll be embracing a classic type of image quality that everyone will love.
A white building with a red The New York sign, trees, and a wet street under a partly cloudy sky.
Brick row houses and leafy green trees line a quiet residential street on a cloudy day.
Aurelio Ramos’s LUMIX LUT Sample Image: Solara taken with the Panasonic LUMIX S9
View of a riverside city scene with buildings, trees, and a bridge under a partly cloudy sky.
28mm f2 brightin star camera lumix s9
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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.
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