Continued from the previous post!
I placed an order with B&H Photo Video for the Samyang lens on the 9 Jan WEDS afternoon, and it was delivered by DHL Express on 12 Jan SAT afternoon – two days ahead of the scheduled latest date. However, on top of paying the requisite 7% Goods and Service Tax for the imported item since the cost of the lens itself exceeded SGD400, DHL also added an additional SGD20 surcharge which they itemized as ‘Advance Payment’. A check online showed that other persons who’ve used DHL also had the same surcharge tacked on, and a couple of persons suggested that the SGD20 is a service fee that DHL imposes for paying GST on your behalf first. That was unexpected and really annoying, and will make me think very hard about choosing DHL as my shipping service for future purchases.
In any case, the lens arrived in a large cardboard carton, with the lens box itself bubble wrapped but not actually secured within the box i.e. it was bouncing around the excess space within the carton. Thankfully, the lens itself is further cushioned by the usual compacted foam inside its box, so fared none the worse. There have been user comments of the camera body not recognizing the lens when it’s mounted, but I had no such issues for my copy so far based on the couple of times I’ve mounted and removed the lens.
First comments and impressions!
One of the things I intensely disliked on the Olympus side of m4/3 were their routine Scrooge-like omissions when bundling lens accessories – especially by their not including lens hoods in their packages for selected lenses. Thankfully, I haven’t observed any such scringing for the bunch of Sony and Samyang FE mount lenses I’ve bought so far. Like the others, a petal-styled hood and lens pouch are included in the box for the Samyang AF 35mm f1.4 lens. The lens pouch here is the usual soft fabric type, not the super cool reinforced protected case the company’s 35mm f2.8 lens came with.
The Samyang is a large lens, but the similar lenses from Sigma and also Sony Distagon are also of similar girth and mass. I reckon this has to do with it’s f1.4 maximum aperture rather than the 35mm focal length, since the Samyang AF 35mm f2.8 I already have is just about a third of the length of this beast. The focusing ring feels smooth and is of the Focus By Wire design. Not that I see myself using the manual focusing ring very much under normal conditions, unless maybe I’m taking pictures of the sky at night. The lens is really minimalist in its design, and aside from the focusing ring, imprints on the sides on the manufacturer name, focal length, aperture stop, miminum focusing distance etc., there are little other lens features like a manual vs auto focusing switch, distance scale, aperture ring, nor additional Fn buttons that are occasionally found on the FE lenses made by Sony.
I’ve frequently taken my m4/3 bodies with a small prime – the Olympus 17mm f1.8 or my old Panasonic 14mm f2.5 – to retail stores to take photos of our ids, and the Sony A73 with the Samyang AF 35mm f2.8 likewise is also a very compact combination. The size of the 35mm f1.4 though makes this lens and A73 a less stealthy setup. I expect to be asked by store staff to cease and desist if I keep pulling out this FE behemoth in say Popular Bookstore to take pictures of the kids!
As this lens is designed specifically for Sony Alpha camera bodies, all focusing modes, including Eye AF, are supported and seems to work as intended. Several owners of the lens have remarked though about how noisy the focusing motor is during video recording. I don’t use ILCs for video, but setting the lens to AF-C does produce evidence of a very hard at work AF motor, both audibly and also by the amount of small vibrations the lens causes.
Optics-wise, I think I’ve got a good copy of the lens. Center sharpness when wide-open seems as good as what reviewers have commented on. I haven’t taken a hard look at corner performance yet. But this lens is primarily intended to be a portrait lens, so any lack of corner sharpness won’t bother me too much.
This Samyang is recognised in Lightroom but oddly correction for vignetting is not automatically applied. The lens profile to correct that can be manually selected through Lightroom’s pull-down list, but that just means an additional step in my image post-processing workflow.
And first pictures of course!
I’ve already remarked that this Samyang lens is currently by far the most affordable native FE mount 35mm f1.4 lens available on the market, so that alone means quite a lot – the already decent performance and optics notwithstanding. The lens size does take some getting used to, considering how tiny the 35mm f2.8 equivalents are, and that the Olympus 17mm f1.8 is also equally diminutive. I reckon for most casual users of the Sony A7 series, the Samyang 35mm f2.8 or the roughly similarly priced Sony version of the lens will suffice, but if you want the f1.4 speed at this focal length and don’t want to spend a lot of money, this Samyang is definitely worth a look.
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