360Photography

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The Rokinon/Samyang AF 35mm F1.4 FE ($ 800) is a lens that delivers a lot of speed at budget price, and is significantly less expensive than Sony’s similar lens, the Distagon T* FE 35mm F1.4 ZA, which retails for $ 1499. At that budget price, the Rokinon comes with a few compromises – but not as many as you might think.

Side-by-side, the Rokinon and Sony lenses are almost exactly the same size, and of similar cosmetic design. Whether or not this is intentional, it makes the lens feel somewhat Sony-esque. It has a 67mm filter ring, compared to 72mm on the Sony, and is just slightly heavier (645g vs. 630g). Subjectively speaking, it feels very solid in your hand.

Optical performance exceeded my expectations for a lens at this price point. It’s surprisingly sharp wide open, though stopping it down does sharpen things up. The lens does exhibit longitudinal chromatic aberration (magenta and green fringing in front of and behind the focus plane, respectively), but even when looking at 42MP images from the a7R III you might need to look pretty close to see it. However, it can be distracting around high contrast edges, such as the specular highlights in the lower left corner of this shot at the beach. Lateral chromatic aberration is generally well controlled.

The lens has some issues with bokeh as well. You can see examples of onion ring patterns in the out of focus Christmas lights at the Pike Place Market. However, this was more the exception than the rule across the photos I took. Interestingly, neither of these aberrations are as bad as what we saw with the Rokinon 50mm F1.4.

Autofocus is neither as quick nor as decisive as on the native Sony lens (which is very fast, thanks to Direct Drive SSM). If you’re used to quick focusing lenses, the Rokinon can feel slow, though I didn’t find it sluggish enough that I would consider it unusable, and most of the time it slides into focus without much trouble. It performs better in this respect than Rokinon’s AF 50mm F1.4 lens, which hunts noticeably.

Although the Rokinon AF 35mm F1.4 FE isn’t a particularly fast focusing lens, it does focus in low light, allowing you to shoot reliably in dim settings. 35mm | ISO 800 | F2.8 | 1/250 sec. Photo by Dale Baskin

Autofocus works reasonably well in video, but the autofocus motor is audible during operation. The good news is that it makes a lot less noise than its 50mm F1.4 sibling, which can be heard several feet away. It’s unlikely to be noticed by anyone other than the photographer except in very quiet settings, but it’s certainly loud enough to be picked up by on-camera microphones if you’re recording video. The lens also supports Sony’s Eye AF, and it generally worked reliably for me.

If you’re looking for a fast 35mm F1.4 lens to use with an E-mount camera, the Rokinon is definitely worth considering. Optical performance is good (in some cases, as good as the Sony), though it’s still not in the same league as the Canon 35mm F1.4L II USM, which can be used on E-mount with an adapter. For the price, however, it delivers a lot of bang for your buck and could be a viable alternative if you’re on a budget.

See our Rokinon AF 35mm F1.4 FE gallery

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)

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The Rokinon/Samyang AF 50mm F1.4 FE ($ 500) and AF 35mm F1.4 FE ($ 800) represent the South Korean manufacturer’s first foray into the autofocus lens market. The 50mm F1.4 is a steal compared to Sony’s own Planar T* FE 50mm F1.4 ZA ($ 1400). So what do you sacrifice, and is it worth the savings? In short, it’s enough to say this lens is no gem in a bargain’s disguise. But it’s not a bad piece of glass either.

The housing is made of metal like the Planar T* and the build quality is reassuringly dense – nothing rattles around when you shake it (a very scientific test indeed). It’s a little bit smaller than the Planar T* (the filter ring is 67mm vs 72mm), as well as lighter (645g / 1.4lb vs 778g / 1.7lb). But the Planar T* is by all accounts a large, heavy prime, meaning the Rokinon too feels hefty to lug around. It left this reviewer yearning for the comparably tiny/light-weight Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA instead.

The Rokinon/Samyang AF 50mm F1.4 FE, shot wide open. ISO 100 | F1.4 | 1/5000 sec

Photographers considering the Rokinon AF 50mm are likely doing so because of its F1.4 maximum aperture. Wide open, it’s not terribly sharp, but photos shot at F1.4 are certainly usable, especially if you add more sharpening in ACR or Photoshop. As you’d expect, sharpness improves as you stop down (until you hit diffraction territory). For a full stop aperture progression, head to the end of our gallery.

There’s a considerable amount of longitudinal chromatic aberration (purple and green fringing), and it can be really distracting around high contrast edges – see the second image in the gallery. While this can often be removed – to an extent anyway – in ACR or Lightroom, it’s often difficult or very time consuming, and comes with the risk of desaturation of other areas of your photo. Lateral CA corrections were left off for images in this gallery, and while you can turn it on in-camera or in Raw processing software, lateral CA seems to be well-controlled in this lens.

The other significant reason photographers are likely to consider this lens over the cheaper manual focus Rokinon 50/1.4 is its autofocus. Unfortunately, we don’t have a whole lot of good news in this department. In use, the AF motor is very noisy, not unlike a distant submarine distress call. That, or a very near dental tool. Trying to use it paired with the Sony a7R III in AF-C is a nightmare. Focus speeds are slow, loud, and AF is easily confused, sending the lens into a painfully long hunt. Performance and focus accuracy are far more reliable in AF-S. Eye AF, one of our favorite Sony features thanks to its uncanny ability to grab a subject’s eye and lock focus is sadly inaccurate and unreliable when used with this lens.

This would not be my first choice for a normal Sony FE lens with AF, but it’s still capable of lovely results. ISO 100 | F2.5 | 1/1000 sec

The lens also has some issues with bokeh. Take a look at the onion rings in the out-of-focus highlights here, and if you search around the image above at 1:1, you’ll see slightly out-of-focus highlights having distracting holes in their center.

The takeaway: If you’re on a budget and want an FE 50mm F1.4 lens with autofocus, well, you don’t have a lot of options. Seeing as you can get some nice, usable images wide open, I wouldn’t steer you away from pulling the trigger on the Rokinon. But I would probably try to convince you to settle for F1.8 and save up for the Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA ($ 900) instead (quality-wise it is far superior to the Sony FE 50mm F1.8 – $ 200).

That said, optically this lens actually performed better than I expected a first-generation AF lens to. And I’m pretty excited to see Rokinon stepping into new territory.

See our Rokinon AF 50mm F1.4 FE gallery

Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)