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The Panasonic Lumix S9 has had a bit of wild ride since its launch in May of 2024. At first, everyone hated on it, then through a series of software updates, it became a pretty solid little travel camera. There are tradeoffs, like no EVF and no Mechanical shutter, but with some recording limitations removed, it started to make a lot more sense. Except for one thing: the camera was impressively small for a full frame camera, but all the lenses for L mount were either big or slow.
Then, in August of 2025, TT Artisan announced their AF 40mm F2 lens. This wasn’t the biggest release in the world for Z mount and E mount users who already had fast compact primes, but for us L mount scrubs, it was huge. This Lilliputian lens is reasonably fast at f2, dirt cheap at $168 (Currently. Unless an orange man with a perfectly smooth brain changes this…), VERY compact, lightweight, basically everything you might want for a travel lens for the S9. Finally! Also, I’d like to pause for a minute to show you exactly what I mean by “Very compact”. This is the S9 with the TT artisan lens mounted on it, sitting beside the Lumix 50mm f1.8
The Lumix S 50mm F1.8 lens ALONE is longer than the TT Artisan 40mm f2 AND the camera.
Anyway, I ordered the TT Artisan lens pretty much the moment it was available, and in a rare stroke of luck, mine arrived just a few days before I left for a roadtrip to Eureka Springs, Arkansas.
Eureka Springs is a picturesque little Ozark town in northwest Arkansas. Lots of old buildings and mountains and tons of opportunities for photos. I took a leap of faith and only brought the S9 and the 40 f/2. I’m just gonna cut to the chase and drop in a few dozens photos here for you guys to check out.
I did a pretty good mix of everything, I have some landscape photography, some food photography, portraits, daytime outdoor, nighttime indoor, backlit, front lit, a bunny lit from below, some pictures in a cave 300 feet underground, just everything. Also, these are straight out of camera jpegs with nothing on the lens but a UV filter.
Pretty much all the color photos are using the Fujify nostalgic neg lut. The black and white photos are using the S9’s built-in Leica Monochrome profile. Anyway, my pictures, look at them.
Overall, I’m super impressed with this lens. It really feels like this is the right size lens to make the Lumix S9 really make sense. The camera with the TT Artisan lens really feels nice to carry and use and balances very well. I find with the other lenses on this camera it feels very front heavy and is a little awkward to carry on a neck strap because it’s constantly trying to tip forward.
This lens isn’t optically perfect or anything, and it definitely has some “Character”, which you will either love or hate, but I personally really like it. I don’t use my S9 for clinical photos, and I think for EDC and travel, a lens that trades clinical perfection for much less size makes a lot of sense, but this is a very personal call. I think it’s kind of a waste of time to spend a few thousand words trying to describe the character of a lens, so uh, look at the nearly 50 pictures above. You should be able to decide if this lens is for you or not in terms of optics.
I have heard a few reports that people have problems with the autofocus if you’re trying to track something using continuous AF, and the thing you’re tracking is close to the edge of the sensor, but the Sony and Nikon versions had the same issue and that was fixed with a firmware update, I fully expect the same thing to happen with the L mount variant. Also maybe it’s just the way I shoot with this camera but I never noticed it myself.
For me, autofocus was fast and reliable. There’s some vignetting wide open but the vignette compensation in the S9 pretty much gets rid of it entirely.
I know I keep going back to the “This lens is small” thing, but that’s really such a huge feature for a camera like the S9. On my S5ii, I don’t find the Lumix S 1.8 lenses to be too big at all, but that’s a much bigger camera that you don’t really expect to be tiny anyway. This small body really feels great with a small lens on it. With this lens on the S9, we’re getting pretty close to like Fuji X100 territory in terms of size, but with a full frame sensor and the (in my opinion) superior Real Time Lut feature.
I honestly think that if you have a Lumix S9, you should just buy this TT Artisan lens. At $168, it’s pretty damn close to impulse purchase territory. It’s the right size for the S9, it’s pretty fast at F2, and it honestly makes this a super compelling travel camera. Even if it doesn’t become your favorite lens in the world, there are definitely times in which you will like having it, and I feel like it’s almost impossible to NOT get $168 worth of value out of this lens.
I carried this setup all over the very mountainous city of Eureka Springs and I never felt it was cumbersome or wished I had left my camera at the hotel room. And that, to me, is really the biggest single qualification for a travel camera. The best camera is the one you have with you, and with this lens the S9 becomes a very capable camera that’s effortless to carry in pretty much any situation. It fits nicely in even my small sling bag, so I end up bringing this camera with me literally everywhere, and since I always have a camera on me, I take more photos. And isn’t that the point?
