Sirui launched the world’s first autofocusing anamorphic cine lens in the form of the 1.33x Anamorphic 40mm T1.8 late last year. I covered that lens in depth, and you can get my full thoughts by watching the video review or reading the text review. In summary, however, I found the addition of autofocus to be invaluable in getting quick run and gun footage. It was far more useful than the typical cine lens for the type of footage that most of us are getting, eliminating the need for focus follow equipment or even particularly skill in pulling focus. Sirui is back with a second lens in the series with the AF 1.33x Anamorphic 20mm T1.8, and this lens has the potential to be even more useful due to the wider focal length that hits a sweet spot for a lot of video projects. Is this a lens you should add to your kit? Find out be exploring my findings in either my video review or in this text review.

Follow Me @ YouTube | Patreon |  Instagram | Facebook | DA Merchandise | Flickr | 500px | X

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. Visit here to see the product listing page for the 20mm T1.8 1.33 Anamorphic.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Let’s dive a little more into the specifics of the lens.

• This is an S35 (APS-C) lens, though it does a reasonable job of covering the full frame image circle on my Sony bodies.
• It is a 20mm lens, excellent for wide angle shots (in full frame)
• Switch to the 1.5x S35 crop, and you have a full frame equivalent of 30mm.
• The anamorphic “squeeze” is a constant 1.33x, or a 2.35:1 ratio when shooting 16:9 (you will have some black bars on top and bottom and a wider cinematic look after desqueezing).
• The T-stop of the lens is T1.8, which means that it is moderately bright and can create a fairly shallow depth of field.
• Lens mount options include Sony E-mount (tested here), Nikon Z, Fuji X, and M43
• The aperture and focus rings are geared with standard 360° throw rotation for the focus ring.
• MSRP will be $799 USD.
• You can choose between two different versions of the lens, including a blue streak/flare version and a natural warm streak version (tested here)

I wondered aloud in the previous review if the 40mm was a “one-off” of part of a series. We got the answer to that pretty quickly, as this 20mm was only about two months behind the 40mm. Typically they have assigned series names to all of their lenses (mostly utilizing celestial themes like Aurora, Saturn, Venus, etc…), but so far these lenses haven’t had a series name attached to them, relying on the 1.33x Anamorphic label to identify them on the top.

Unlike the Samyang V-AF series of hybrid cine/stills lenses, this lens makes less sense as a photography lens because of the anamorphic ratio. The raw images out of the camera will have a weird stretched look to them.

It is possible to edit that file into the appropriate ratio, but it will require a little unusual editing working through free transform, and even then the amount of transforming (desqueezing) needed is outside the range of what I can do in Lightroom, for example. Here’s the best I could do there with the image above:

I would only use this lens for standard photography as a last resort, so while this lens is capable of taking stills (just like any cine lens), it really should be treated as a pure cine lens, which is how I’ll handle this review.

20mm Anamorphic Build and Handling

As noted in the intro, I feel like the 20mm Anamorphic along with the 40mm take a number of design cues from the Aurora. This includes the feature set, the fonts, and the general finish of the lens, though the cine design of the lens is apparent from the geared design of the aperture and focus rings.

As with the Aurora lenses, the fonts on the side are bolder than most lenses. This is like the “large print” edition of lenses.

The Sirui badge on the right side and the click | declick button look pretty much identical to the Aurora lineup.

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 F22 (minimum aperture) and A mode that should keep you from accidentally straying in either direction.

The aperture shape was a little odd on the 40mm, the 20mm seems to have a more traditional (for cine) oval shape.

There are 11 aperture blades in the iris itself.

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

You can see that the front filter thread is a common 77mm size, a filter size shared with the 40mm. The front of the lens is a standard 80mm diameter to accommodate a matte box.

The 20mm Anamorphic has a similar diameter but is quite a bit shorter than the 40mm. The diameter is 80mm (3.1″), as mentioned, and while Sirui doesn’t give a length measurement, I measure it at right over 90mm (3.54″). That’s a full 30mm shorter than the 40mm, and helps to explain the over 100g lighter weight (499g/17.6 oz).

The manual focus ring is geared and has very light damping. It has a linear focus throw of 360°, so major focus changes won’t come quickly, but you will have greater accuracy for smaller throws.

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

I’ve previously done Sirui firmware updates, and the process was a simple drag and drop of the firmware file into the folder that will pop up once the lens is attached to a computer.

You’ll also find a weathersealing gasket located there, and I suspect there is further weather sealing as well.

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.

Minimum focus distance 40cm, so you can’t get particularly close to subjects and the resulting magnification level isn’t super high. It isn’t difficult to get inside that minimum focus distance if you aren’t careful. Here’s a frame from as close as I could to a wall decoration, and you can see the magnification is not high.

I would say that the overall handling and feature set of the lens is enjoyable. It takes a lot of features that I’ve come to appreciate on stills lenses and has largely done a good job of transferring into a functional autofocusing cine lens.

The lens also comes with a nice package, including a nice zippered nylon case with a carrying strap. I would say that in general this lens is being handled like a premium lens but without a particularly premium price. The MSRP is $799, but an early bird price of just $639 is available here. That’s not a bad price for these genuinely useful lenses.

Autofocus

Sirui has equipped the 20mm Anamorphic 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. This one is fairly good, with overall quiet operation, fairly quick speed, and good confidence. Most of what I’ll show you in the review (other than photos of the lens) will be screenshots from video footage for obvious reasons.

I found that focus locked onto Nala well as I approached her with a camera, and stayed locked on as she stretched and rolled around in response.

Focus locked (ahem) onto the lock in the shot above, providing good and consistent focus there.

Focus speed in my tests is not at the “instant” level (few STM lenses are), but is fast enough that there is no apparent lag nor any visible steps. Focus confidence seemed good.

Focus noise is very low. As I’ve said, I don’t think this is really the kind of lens that people will use for stills, but AF wouldn’t be the hindrance to using the lens that way.

The more important tests are video centric, and I have all good news to report there.

Focus pulls were smooth and quick with no visible steps. There is a nice level of damping to the pulls which makes them feel smooth. Focus breathing is much lower than the 40mm, so this is a good lens to do pulls with.

My “hand test” where I alternately block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then remove it went well, with nice, confident transitions that also had a nice level of damping.

More organic pulls within shots where I start with a foreground object and then pan towards a distant background look great, with a very smooth transition that is not abrupt or jarring at all.

It’s worth noting that if you have something like an Atamos Ninja, it will do live desqueeze so that you can both compose more naturally (seeing the end result) and also get footage that is arrives desqueezed so that you could eliminate an editing step or skip editing altogether. I’m showing the footage with the on screen information, but you can obviously just record high end footage as well.

I would say that both the shorter focal length and a slightly longer development cycle have allowed Sirui to produce a lens that focuses even better than the first lens in the series. The 20mm Anamorphic was an easy platform

Sirui 20mm Anamorphic Image Quality

If you are here as a regular reader with expectations of how this section will look, know that things are a little different when reviewing a cine lens. This section will be focused less on charts and more on what I encounter in real world use. Absolute sharpness is a little less critical in a cine lens, but things like chromatic aberrations are a bigger deal because they are much more difficult to correct.

First of all, however, I want to explore full frame coverage. Like the 40mm, the 20mm Anamorphic is being marketed as an S35 (APS-C) lens, but it seems to cover the frame image circle reasonably well (though not as well as the 40mm). Let’s take a look at an F5.6 stills shot take covering the whole full frame image circle. I’ve transformed the ratio to as close of a desqueezing as Lightroom allows, but other than that, the image on the right is uncorrected. One advantage for movie capture is that the natural 16:9 crop will eliminate a bit more of this vignette than what shows in the original 3:2 stills image.

On the right side I’ve maxed out Lightroom’s vignette correction, and we can see that in this extreme situation (snow is definitely one of the worst situations for showing vignette in the real world!) that vignette correction doesn’t do a perfect job, but the vignette is correctable. It isn’t the hard mechanical type vignette where no light has reached the sensor.

If we look at a crop from the edge, we can definitely see that image quality does drop off past the S35 crop area, but doesn’t disappear altogether. This matters because sometimes the edges are less important in certain cine shots, as the concentration of sharpness in the inner part of the image helps focus the eyes much like a vignette. I note this effect being pretty commonly used in a lot of cine work, and it is actually one of the typical attributes of anamorphic lenses generally.

That being said, I’m not as entranced with the idea of using this as a full frame option as I was with the 40mm, but in a pinch you could definitely get some wider shots, so long as you don’t mind doing some correction.

A similar edit to an APS-C shot shows that a lot of those issues are eliminated, and it looks cleaner in general. If you have enough room to shoot S35, you will definitely get cleaner footage.

There are two primary optical weaknesses of the 20mm Anamorphic: lateral style chromatic aberrations (fringing near the edge of the frame) and distortion.

I do see fringing in some real world shots, and it is a little more obvious when using the lens with full frame coverage because there is more in the image that has poorer optical correction. Here’s a look at a stills image that shows pronounced fringing before correction (left side) and what remains afterwards (right side).

Removing lateral CA is fairly easy for stills, so if this was a photo-centric lens, it wouldn’t be a huge problem. Removing CA is much more difficult in video work, but you also have the advantage that you are never examining corners at 100% like this, either. Still there was enough of this kind of fringing that I could see it in some shots, though it will become less obvious when you shoot S35 and there is less of the weak portions of the lens in the frame.

I have found that distortion is definitely an issue with Sirui’s wide angle cine lenses, and the 20mm Anamorphic has some issues here as well. Vertical lines near the edge of the frame will get bent, and again it is the most obvious when shooting full frame.

Shooting in S35 reduces that distortion by clipping off the most affected portion of the image. I mostly see distortion in movement shots when panning or moving past a vertical line right near the edge of the frame.

The distortion can be corrected, though it will often require the premium (not free) versions of editing software like Da Vinci Resolve, for example.

I found that footage from the 20mm Anamorphic could hold up to a lot of sharpening. I didn’t find footage naturally to be as sharp as what I would like, but felt like I could add a fair bit of sharpening with it falling apart.

With a wide angle lens like this there will be less potential for creating strongly defocused backgrounds (particularly since the maximum magnification at close distances is low). The quality of the bokeh is fairly neutral; it doesn’t stand out to be as either good or bad.

But shots without specular highlights look nice and clean, and the actual falloff from focus to defocus is pretty good.

This focal length/maximum aperture combination isn’t going to result in backgrounds being completely blurred away very often, but those of you familiar with cinematography probably already knew that.

Flare resistance is not bad. I tested the “natural streak” version of the lens, so, by design, it is going to give the streak effects often valued for cinematic shots. You can see that streak along the top of this shot along with some mild ghosting artifacts.

When stopped down you can see more of the sunburst effect along with a few slightly more pronounced ghosting effects, but they aren’t extreme.

Video footage generally looked good. Sirui’s optical glass isn’t my favorite, but the anamorphic footage looks very cinematic and works well (particularly if you’re grading it).

This isn’t priced like a Zeiss, and the optical glass doesn’t performance like Zeiss, but for those with more budget constraints who want to produce cinematic content, the Sirui Autofocus 1.33 Anamorphic 20mm T1.8 works pretty well.

Conclusion

I was excited when Sirui shared the news of this lens with me. I found the 40mm to be a tool that my team and I will get some use out of, and a 20mm lens is arguably even more useful because of the focal length. The Sirui Anamorphic 20mm T1.8 as a wide angle lens comes with a few more optical flaws (more chromatic aberrations and distortion), though it also seems to be the better lens in terms of flare resistance.

It’s not quite as useful for use on full frame sensors, but good enough that you can definitely grab some shots in a pinch. The frame below is unedited, showing that in some situations the heavier vignette and even additional fringing isn’t a deal breaker.

The Sirui Autofocus 1.33x Anamorphic 20mm T1.8 joins a very, very short list of anamorphic lenses that also have autofocus, but I won’t be surprised to see this segment grow. Samyang has approached it by the releasing an anamorphic adapter for their V-AF series of lenses, and I suspect other lensmakers will dip their toes in this space if these Sirui lenses prove popular. In the meantime, the Sirui 20mm Anamorphic is a fun place to start. It’s time to start creating!

Pros:

• Nice looking lens with nice build
• Smaller and lighter than the 40mm
• Includes nice case
• USB-C port for firmware updates
• Very feature rich
• Weather sealed
• Declickable aperture
• Custom button
• Autofocus motor is quiet and fast
• Low focus breathing
• Decent flare resistance
• Does cover the full frame image circle reasonably well
• Affordable price

Cons:

• Some lateral fringing issues
• Some barrel distortion
• Sirui optical glass isn’t amazing

_________________________________________________________________________

GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sirui AF 1.33 Anamorphic 20mm T1.8 here during Kickstarter period

After Kickstarter, purchase @ Sirui Store (use code DustinA5 for 5% off) | B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

____________________________________________________________________

Purchase the Sirui AF 1.33 Anamorphic 40mm T1.8 @ Sirui Store (use code DustinA5 for 5% off) | B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

___________________________________________________________________

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

__________________________________________________________________

Purchase the Sony a6600 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

Purchase the Sony a6400 @ B&H Photo | Amazon | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

_________________________________________________________________

Want to support this channel? Use these affiliate links to shop at: B&H Photo | Amazon | Adorama | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Ebay | Make a donation via Paypal

Buy DA Merchandise https://bit.ly/TWIMerch

Keywords: Sirui Autofocus Anamorphic 20mm T1.8, Sirui, Anamorphic, 20mm, T1.8, Sirui Autofocus Anamorphic Review, 1.33x, 1.33x Anamorphic, Sirui 40mm Review, Anamorphic 20mm T1.8 Review, T1.8, Review, 40mm, Sony alpha 1, Sony a7RV, Wireless, Review, Hands On, Dustin Abbott, Real World, Comparison, Sharpness, Bokeh, Flare Resistance, Autofocus, Image Quality, Sample Images, Video, Photography, let the light in, weathersealing, #letthelightin, DA