Just a few years ago, I had never reviewed a Sirui lens. I had reviewed a few tripods from the company, but I didn’t think of them as a lensmaker. They then approached me about covering a few of their cine lenses, and while that isn’t my forte, I agreed to do so out of some interest in the unique materials they were using in their lens design (carbon fiber, in this case). Since that point I’ve reviewed about a dozen lenses from them, including cine lenses, their Nightwalker series, an anamorphic lens, and all five lenses in their Sniper autofocus series. But I’ve never been more excited to do a Sirui review than the one I’m doing today, for a number of reasons. First of all, this is their first full frame autofocus lens, and I would presume that the Aurora 85mm F1.4 is the first in a new series of Aurora lenses. Secondly, while Sirui has always utilized some really cool materials in their designs (they know how to make a unique lens!), the Aurora series if the first time they’ve really kicked up the feature set, with the Aurora 85mm sporting a set of features that would compete with Sigma or even a first party lens. Thirdly, they’ve managed to make a full frame 85mm F1.4 lens that is smaller and lighter than what anyone else has done. Finally, I was a bit slow getting my review copy, so a few reviews are already out, and I found that I really, really liked the look of the rendering from the lens. Add to that the fact that Sirui is discounting the already inexpensive price of $600 down to $500 for the holidays…and throwing in a few bonus filters, and they’ve definitely got my attention. Did they pull off the value 85mm on Sony, Nikon, and Fuji? You can find out my full thoughts by watching the video review below…or reading on.

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Thanks to Sirui for sending me a review sample of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with my Sony a7RV or Sony Alpha 1 cameras.

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One other area that I was interested in was being able to evaluate Sirui’s autofocus on a platform other than Fuji, which is where I’ve reviewed the Sniper series. Fuji’s autofocus is quite a bit behind that of other major brands like Sony, Canon, or Nikon, so I feel like my impression of Sirui’s autofocus has been held back a bit by the limitations of the camera. I’m doing this review on Sony, where no such limitations exist, and it will give me a more accurate view of the “state of play” with Sirui’s autofocus.

I’ll give Sirui high marks for presentation. There’s a clever little tab made of material that allows the box to be easily opened, and inside they packed the lens in a zippered and padded nylon case (like Sigma’s lenses), which actually adds real protection value, unlike, say, a Canon L series drawstring pouch. The lens is shrinkwrapped inside to help it to be perfectly sealed during shipment. I’m not a big “unboxing” kind of reviewer, but I was impressed as I unboxed the Aurora 85mm.

It’s great to see another 85mm F1.4 option on the market, particularly one that does have a number of nice strengths. It’s probably not going to dethrone my Simga 85mm F1.4 DN for me personally, but I’ll also note that it costs half as much.

This is a very nice full frame portrait lens for $500…so let’s dive in and get the details.

Aurora 85mm Build and Handling

As noted in the intro, the Aurora series is a step up for Sirui in build quality and feature set. In some ways, however, the design language of the Aurora series is more stereotypical than their typical recent designs. Thus far the only color scheme seems to be black, so no white or silver. The overall appearance is nicely clean though with bolder fonts and bigger writing than most lenses. They want you to understand that this is a full frame lens, for example. How do I know that? Because they wrote it right on the barrel.

The fonts on the side, too, are quite bold. This is like the “large print” edition of lenses.

The Sirui badge on the right side of the barrel is probably the most subtle thing here.

The front face is more clean and simple. I always like when there is lens information on the front of a lens.

The lens itself is definitely on the small side for an 85mm F1.4. Not as small as the Sony FE 85mm F1.8, but definitely smaller and lighter than any of the F1.4 options save the Samyang Series II (which I reviewed here). The lens is 80.3 (3.2″) in diameter x 102 mm (4″) in length. It manages to get by with a 67mm front filter thread compared to the 77mm of the Sigma 85mm F1.4 DN or the 72mm of the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 II. It weighs 540g (1.4lb), which is slightly more than the 509g of the Samyang but less than the 625g of the Sigma. You can see that while the two lenses are similar in length, the Sigma lens is definitely wider in diameter.

The included lens hood (pictured above) is fairly plain. It is a cheaper feeling plastic (relative to the more robust aluminum alloy housing of the lens) that is distinguished mostly by a ribbed grip ring. It bayonets on a little tighter (the tolerances could be a little better here) but at least won’t be jarred free.

This is a fairly feature rich lens. It has a robust approach to aperture control, including a manual aperture ring that can be controlled with clicks (at one third stop detents) or clickless by changing the position of the switch on the right side of the lens.

You also have the option of switching into A (automatic) mode if you prefer to control aperture from within the camera. This isn’t an iris lock, but there is a nice long detent in between F16 and A mode that should keep you from accidentally straying in either direction.

The aperture iris itself is beautiful, with 15 rounded blades, which is well more than any of the competitors.

On the left side of the barrel there is a Function button that can be programmed to a wide range of functions from within the camera along with an AF | MF switch.

The manual focus ring has a nice feel to it overall. The damping is good, and focus smooths well without any apparent lag between input on the ring and the actual focus action. The active focus area will be automatically magnified if you have that setting enabled.

At the rear of the lens you’ll find a USB-C port that allows for quick and easy firmware updates.

You’ll also find a weathersealing gasket located there, and Sirui adds that there is a fluorine coating on the front element. There seems to be some other seals as well. Sirui actually used the word “waterproof” in their marketing, but I’m not aware of any lens actually being waterproof. Weathersealed is probably a better term, meaning that you can use it when it is raining, but don’t drop it in a pool or the ocean and expect all to be well!

Right now Sirui is including two filters as a bonus. One is UV protection filter, which I personally don’t use but some photographers swear by.

The second is more interesting to me, as it is a “Black Mist” filter. This gives you a little more of a glow to an image, a slightly more dreamy look that can be interesting in certain situations. Here’s a quick comparison of a scene with and without the filter. Note that it affects not only the subject but also the bokeh, too.

It’s a nice bonus on a portrait oriented lens, and we’ll come back to that in the image quality section.

The lens barrel is made of metal (aluminum alloy), and it has a nice, anodized black satin finish. Overall I would call it a nice looking lens even if I do find the badging/writing a little overwrought.

85mm lenses are rarely known for great levels of magnification, and that’s true here. Minimum focus distance is 85cm, which is pretty much dead on with what the Sigma and Samyang allow. That will give maximum magnification figure of right at 0.12x, which is obviously very average.

While the Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 isn’t precisely the smallest and lightest 85mm F1.4 lens out there, it is very close, and unlike the Samyang, it gives you a metal body and more features, which feels like a nice tradeoff for the additional 31g of weight. Overall I’m happy about what we have here. I love to see when companies “level up” in their lens design.

Stills Autofocus

Sirui has equipped the Aurora 85mm with an STM or stepping motor. While I consider STM motors to be the lower tier of modern mirrorless AF motors (with Linear and Voice Coil motors in an upper tier), the truth of the matter is that there’s a pretty broad range of performance with STM motors. The Sigma 85mm F1.4 DN also has an STM motor, for example, and it costs twice as much. Obviously the Sirui won’t be able to compete with the Sony 85mm F1.4 GM II, which has incredibly fast autofocus thanks to having two XD Linear motors, and those are the largest of their kind that Sony has made to this point. If your plans for an 85mm prime include capturing sports action, you’ll probably want to stick with something like the Sony or, if you’re shooting Nikon, perhaps consider the Z 85mm F1.8 S instead. But for most people in most situations, the autofocus performance on the Aurora 85mm is going to work just fine.

You can see from the shots above that the lens delivered nicely accurate results on either my Sony a7RV or my Alpha 1, with good precision on any kind of trackable subject even if the subject (like Ferrari here) was in profile.

Focus is very accurate on the eye itself, not anything else.

There is almost no noise to be heard even if I put my ear next to the lens barrel. There is the slightest buzz from the motor, but so quiet as to be nearly undetectable. Focus speed is good in most situations, too, though I did notice a little lag when going from a very close to a very distant subject. I would say that in most ordinary situations focus speed will be sufficient. It’s nowhere near as fast as the Sony 85mm F1.4 GM II, but probably only a hair slower than the Sigma 85mm F1.4 DN.

I used the Aurora 85mm to record a birthday celebration for my assistant, Craig, and I got well focused results throughout.

I shot a series of portraits with the Aurora 85mm, and it proved very capable of accurate focus in that setting, whether I was shooting through branches:

Shooting at a closer distance:

…or shooting from further away.

Focus was also good for holiday type celebrations.

Focus for general purpose subjects was just good, delivering good accuracy with no drama.

As with most third party lenses, if your goal is tracking fast action, you might want to go with a first party lens, but for most people in most situations, autofocus for stills was pretty great.

Video AF

On the video front I found mostly good results. Focus pulls were smooth and quick with no visible steps. Focus breathing is fairly obvious, but not unusually so for an 85mm lens.

The Aurora 85mm did fine with my “hand test” as well, where I alternately block the view to my face with my hand and then remove it. Focus transitioned nicely from my hand to my face every time with no lag or misses.

Video footage generally looked good. The Aurora has a different look to the optical glass than competing lenses, including lower contrast and a different color signature. If you like it, you like it, but it isn’t quite like other full frame 85mm F1.4 lenses.

I also had fairly good results with video clips where I slowly moved the camera to force change from one subject to another at varying depths of field. Focus transitions were fairly well damped, and overall autofocus feels pretty capable.

Aurora 85mm F1.4 Image Quality Breakdown

The Aurora 85mm has an optical design of 14 elements in 9 groups, which includes some exotic elements like high refractive elements, extra low dispersion elements, and a aspherical element.

The MTF chart shows a fairly consistent performance across the frame with a dip right past midframe, a correction after than, and than a drop right in the very corners. The stopped down performance is almost flat on the sagittal plane, but the tangential plane shows a big dip, speaking to a bit less contrast.

My optical tests are on the 61MP a7RV, which is currently the most demanding resolution point for a full frame camera. I suspect that my testing results will be a little more punishing than a few of the reviews I’ve seen on lower resolution platforms, as you can see from the blue lines in the MTF chart above that the lens looks great on lower resolution points and a little weaker on higher resolution platforms.

There’s one other clue in the MTF chart that may help you to understand my results. Their MTF chargts were developed at 3.4 meters, which is a little over 11 feet. That’s a bit further than standard. The distance to my test chart, for example, would have been more like 2 meters. This is relevant because I really felt like this was a lens that is optimized for portrait distances. I felt like the lens was less impressive at close focus distances, like here at roughly minimum focus distance (F1.4):

…or at infinity/landscape distances (here at F2.8):

But put it in that sweet spot of 8-20 feet (2.5-5 meters) and it is very sharp even at F1.4:

You may have noticed the real strength of the lens in my first and third examples above. This lens has gorgeous rendering and bokeh. It isn’t the sharpest 85mm out there, but it compensates by having really gorgeous bokeh rendering. And, if you are shooting either in A) the optimized shooting distance or B) on a lower resolution camera, you will also get really great sharpness and contrast as well. This doesn’t surprise me, though, as I felt like this was also the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Sniper series as well.

The Aurora 85mm shows some light color fringing before and after the plane of focus (LoCA, or Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations), though nothing excessive in my standard tests. You can see some fringing on my chart, but nothing too bad.

One of the key areas that I see fringing is in the imprinting on lenses and cameras, and this only Pentax combination of my Dad’s often will show major fringing if this is an area a lens struggles with. The Aurora 85mm does surprisingly good in this test even at F1.4.

I didn’t see any fringing around the bright specular highlights here (bokeh balls) either.

But this shot at distance was a different story. I see fringing around bare branches, around the geese on the water, and on a few other textures. It’s as if the colors are not quite properly focusing together, and the result is lost contrast and definition on the textures.

This style of fringing is called lateral chromatic aberrations (LaCA), and after what I saw in some real world shots, I was unsurprised to see it pretty strongly on my test chart as well.

Reducing the color fringing isn’t tough (the “Remove Chromatic Aberration” button on your favorite editing software should take care of that without problem), but what you won’t see restored is the lost detail in your images. That makes this a slightly underwhelming lens for landscapes. In many ways the Aurora 85mm F1.4 is the optical polar opposite of the recent Sony 85mm F1.4 GM II. That lens has some of the best microcontrast that I’ve ever seen, able to resolve amazing detail at both close and distance (some of my landscape images at F1.4 amazed me on that lens). But I was bit underwhelmed by the overall rendering and quality of the bokeh. The Aurora is the opposite. I’m completely underwhelmed by the fine detail rendering in many situations, but absolutely love the overall rendering of the bokeh from lens.

There’s a case to be made for both approaches, but if you’re making the case for the Aurora’s approach, it is that clients and viewers will rarely see the pixel peeping results, but they will always see the big picture rendering results.

The Aurora 85mm is a bit like the Sigma 85mm F1.4 DN in that there is a lot more pincushion distortion than expected. It’s as if both companies left some uncorrected distortion as a engineering trick to reduce the size of the lens. The Sirui isn’t as bad as the Sigma, however, as I used a -7 to correct the nicely linear pincushion distortion and only a +38 to correct the vignette (I needed to max out the vignette slider with the Sigma).

A bit of pincushion distortion can be flattering to portrait subjects, but this is probably excessive. You’ll want to correct at least some of it, though you can probably get away with not correcting the vignette.

Unfortunately the Aurora 85mm does not seem to be getting in-camera correction support. I pulled the JPEG file of the chart test above off my second card and it looked just like the RAW file.

So how about resolution and contrast? My tests have been done on a 61MP Sony a7RV, and crops are typically shown at 200% magnification. Here’s the test chart:

Here are F1.4 crops at roughly 200% from across the frame (center, mid-frame, and lower right corner).

I see mostly good detail across most of the frame (a bit of a drop in the corners, as predicted), but contrast is unexceptional. This is mirrors my findings in real world shots, too, though again the contrast results are better in the “sweet spot” of 2.5-5 meters (8-20 feet).

Stopping down even to F1.8 produces more contrast, particularly in the black levels.

You can see that in this real world example comparing F1.4 and F2 as well.

This is one of those lenses that offers you some choice in how you want things rendered. It’s a nice option at F1.4, as it is still sharp enough for portrait work, but still has a flattering quality to the rendering.

For portrait work I felt that there was plenty of sharpness. Even a fairly deep crop at F1.4 shows nice detail.

You can see that there is a very noticeable bump in sharpness and contrast at F2.8:

From 2.8 to F4 is an even bigger jump, and you can see that now even the corners look impressively sharp.

Peak performance in terms of consistency will be from F4 to F8, where sharpness is most consistent for landscape style work (even if that isn’t the lens’ greatest forte.)

Diffraction will start to soften the image after that, with a mild amount at F11 but a more obvious amount by F16:

But the absolute strength of this lens is in the overall rendering. Images just look really fantastic, with enough sharpness and contrast to be compelling, but it is all complimented by very soft, very creamy bokeh.

Geometry is pretty decent, with some geometric deformation near the edges of the frame, but overall the impression is of big, soft bokeh circles.

There is a bit of swirly busyness in those specular highlights, however, which is probably the biggest negative about the bokeh.

I found the backgrounds nice and creamy in a wide variety of situations, however.

This image has a lot in the transition zone, but it still looks pretty good.

Even the foreground bokeh is nice, which is really important for when you want to use out of focus elements to create natural frames for your subjects.

Flare resistance is mostly good. I had good results where the sun was very brightly right out of frame. You can’t really tell it from this image, but this scene was flooded with window light from a bright, directional sun.

This wide open F1.4 shot was shot into very bright sun around this tree, and while you can see some localized veiling at the epicenter of the sun, contrast has held up well in the image.

Stopping down to F11 reduced the veiling but adding just a little ghosting spot.

With the sun right out of frame and at a certain angle, you will get a glowing veil effect, which fortunately is extremely artistic. Here’s a freeze frame from a video clip:

I’ve added that exact effect to a LOT of images in post because I love the warm glow effect.

The Aurora 85mm is a pretty easy lens to get nice looking images with.

I’m also partial to the rendering from the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 II, leaving us with two pretty great options. Looking back at my review results, I would argue that the Samyang is a hair sharper, but I think the Sirui has nicer bokeh. If you’d like to see more image samples, check out the image gallery here.

Conclusion

The Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 is an interesting step forward for Sirui, as it covers a lot of new territory. It moves into covering the full frame sensor, adds weather sealing, more features, and even ups the included accessories to include filters and a case. Doing all of this at the current price of $499 USD is impressive. And it seems like this lens is getting a lot of glowing reviews from those in the target audience – portrait photographers. The optics are optimized for portrait zones, and the gorgeous rendering/bokeh helps make images really look great. There are sharper options if you are just looking for pure sharpness for landscapes or general purpose, but if your priority is the look of images and having great bokeh, then the Aurora 85mm checks a lot of boxes.

It doesn’t hurt that this becomes the least expensive full frame 85mm F1.4 option on Sony and Nikon, and also offers a more feature rich lens than competitors on Fuji.

Sirui is clearly upping their game and moving into a more mainstream market with the Aurora series. There is perhaps the least amount of competition on the Nikon Z space, but here on a Sony there are a lot of alternatives. Some of them are sharper, but none of them are cheaper, and I’m not sure that any have quite as nice of rendering, so if that matters to you, the Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 is a winner. It’s a lot of lens for $500!

Pros:

• Nice looking lens with nice build
• Smaller and lighter than many competitors
• Includes nice case and filters
• USB-C port for firmware updates
• Good manual focus ring and experience
• Very feature rich
• Weather sealed
• Declickable aperture
• Custom button
• Autofocus motor is quiet and moderately fast
• Good sharpness and contrast at portrait distances
• Beautiful bokeh
• Flare resistance fairly good
• Great price to performance ratio

Cons:

• Some lateral fringing issues
• Pincushion distortion
• Not super sharp at landscape distances
• Lower contrast than competing lenses

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sirui Aurora 85mm F1.4 @ Sirui (use code DustinA5 for 5% off) | B&H Photo | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Purchase the Sony a7RV @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

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