SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 Review

SongRaw? Who is SongRaw? SongRaw is the most recent lensmaker to rise up in China, and they are starting in a much more ambitious space than most new lensmakers. Their first lens is a full frame autofocus 50mm F1.2, something only done twice thus far on Sony FE, and only by Sony first and then Sigma. The SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is a full featured, robust lens that in many ways goes head to head with the Sigma and Sony lenses. And, while it does undercut both in price, a starting price tag of $1000 USD is by no means cheap. This is definitely an ambitious move by SongRaw…but will it pay off? Find out by reading this review or watching the video review linked below.

Thanks to Sigma Canada (Gentec) for sending me a review loaner 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 the Sony a7RV along with the Sony Alpha 1 that serve as my benchmark cameras for Sony lenses. You can visit the product page for SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 here.

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AI SUMMARY: SongRaw is a new lensmaker from China debuting with its ambitious Moonlit 50mm F1.2 full-frame autofocus lens, competing alongside established names like Sony and Sigma but at a more accessible price of $999. Despite its larger size and weight compared to its competitors, the lens boasts an impressive build, using aerospace-grade aluminum and a distinctive aesthetic featuring practical sealing and design elements ideal for photographers who value durability. The autofocus system is precise and reliable for still subjects, but may not match the high-speed focus capabilities of other high-powered systems in its class, making it less suitable for action photography. The Moonlit 50mm F1.2 excels in optical performance, offering beautiful bokeh and subject isolation, though some technical downsides such as flare and chromatic aberration remain.

Strengths:

Competitive pricing relative to other 50mm F1.2 lenses.
Excellent build quality with robust materials and weather sealing.
Good optical performance with beautiful bokeh rendering.
Precise autofocus system suitable for portraits and stills.

Weaknesses:

Larger and heavier compared to competitors, making it less portable.
Autofocus motor not as fast for high-speed action photography.
Notable flare issues at smaller apertures and slight cool/magenta color tones.
As a new entrant, SongRaw faces skepticism about long-term reliability and customer support.

50mm F1.2 Comparisons

SongRaw’s ambitions go beyond the current 50mm F1.2, though, with an 85mm F1.2 also planned in their Moonlit series…which, depending on when the Viltrox LAB 85mm F1.2 arrives, could be the first 85mm F1.2 lens on Sony FE. The Moonlit branding seems to be their identifier for a very bright aperture series, with the inference being that these lenses are bright enough to shoot by moonlight. How about by starlight?

50mm F1.2 lenses are fun, allowing you to shoot with very narrow depths of field and a lot of subject isolation. F1.2 lenses like this are probably most valued by portrait photographers, as they allow you to get more uniquely beautiful portraits than an average 50mm lens.

I also value them for being able to turn ordinary subjects into something special when used right.

Creating an effective full-frame autofocus lens with a maximum aperture of F1.2 is a real challenge. Is the Moonlight 50mm up to that challenge? Let’s find out…

Build and Handling

The SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is a brand new lens but with a fairly classic aesthetic. The flocked finish reminds me of some Canon L series lenses from a decade ago, which is not necessarily a finish that I love…but it does have the practical value of being very resistant to scuffs and marks.

This is not a small lens. It has a diameter of the 90mm (3.54″) and is a whopping 129mm (5.07″) in length. That makes it wider than either the Sony (87mm) or Sigma (81mm) and also considerably longer than the Sony (108mm) or Sigma (110.8mm) lenses. Unsurprisingly it is also heavier, weighing in at 900g (31.75oz) compared to 778g (Sony) or 740g (Sigma). A big part of that weight comes because the body of the Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is made of aerospace grade aluminum alloys.

All three lenses have 72mm front filter threads.

SongRaw wants to make a splash with their optical performance compared with the two titans on E-mount, so that resulted in a big lens. I’ve seen Sigma work that same arc over the past 14 years with their ART series. The first generation of lenses was very big, as the focus for Sigma was nailing the optical performance. It has been in the second and third waves of their lens designs that we’ve seen significant efforts to shrink the size of the lenses while preserving the optical performance.

Bottom line is that if you are put off by large lenses, the Moonlit series probably won’t be for you.

MoonRaw utilized high contrast yellow paint in the aperture ring markings, which has a bit of a Zeiss Otus feel. They have followed the standard being set for all premium lenses on Sony with a fully featured aperture ring. It can be navigated with click (one third stop detents and markings for full stops), but can also be declicked by selecting a switch on the right side of the lens barrel. I was able to successfully perform smooth aperture racks for video when in declicked mode, which is valuable.

The aperture iris has a very high 13 bladed design that allows for nicely circular shapes even when stopped down. Here’s a look at F1.2, F2, and then F2.8:

Beneath the declick switch is a gasket covering a USB-C port for firmware updates. I’ve run that firmware update process and it works similar to what Viltrox has done in the past. If you attach the lens via USB to your computer, a folder for the lens will pop up. You simply download the firmware update file from this website, then copy the file to the lens’ folder. The file will automatically run, causing the folder to briefly disappear, and when it pops back up a few seconds later, the firmware update is done. Very simple.

I don’t love this approach to the USB port, however, as I feel like the gasket detracts somewhat from the finish. I would prefer either a weather sealed exposed port (like Tamron) or with the port located on the lens mount (like Viltrox) for a cleaner finish. This is little more than a personal nitpick, however, as this design works fine.

On the other side of the lens you’ll find an AF | MF switch along with a custom/Fn button. SongRaw gets some extra style points for the function button which carries a stylized SongRaw logo embossed on it.

The final element on the lens barrel is a nice, wide focus ring with rubberized ribs. It has nice damping and moves well, though I do hear a bit of whirring and clicking as the focus motor adjusts focus in response to the manual focus ring’s input. All mirrorless lenses with autofocus use a focus-by-wire system whereby manual focus ring input actually drives the focus motor(s) to make focus changes. Thus, the smoother, faster, and more reactive the focus motor, the smoother the manual focus emulation. In this case manual focus works well, but it isn’t a silent process.

The Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is a thoroughly weather sealed lens, starting with a gasket at the rear mount and internal seals throughout.

The front element has a special coating that SongRaw calls a “Hydrophobic Anti-Smudge” coating, which seems to function similarly to a fluorine coating.

The lens comes with a pouch that looks a lot like the one included with Canon’s L-series lenses or Viltrox’s Pro Series. Also included is a fairly deep hood with a similar flocked finish to the lens barrel. It has a rubberized ring at the front to allow you to set the camera/lens down on that end and also helps absorb a few bumps. It is a welcome inclusion.

The minimum focus distance is 52cm, which is a fair bit longer than the 40cm MFD for the Sony and Sigma lenses. That results in a 0.13x magnification, which is considerably lower than the 0.17x (Sony) and 0.16x (Sigma) of the competition. Here’s what the maximum magnification of the Moonlit 50mm looks like on my test chart:

That’s not particularly high, but the huge maximum aperture does help to ensure that backgrounds are nicely blurred at close focus distances.

Where the SongRaw lens excels in comparison to the competing 50mm F1.2 lenses is in terms of price. The Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is priced at $999 USD, whereas the Sigma costs $1539 USD and the premium Sony costs a whopping $2298 USD. Another competitor worth considering is the Sony 50mm F1.4 GM, which can be had for $1448 USD and is my personal “daily driver”. The Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is the cheapest 50mm F1.2 autofocus lens on the market, though obviously SongRaw has the challenge of being an unproven commodity on the market.

Autofocus

SongRaw has equipped the Moonlit 50mm with an STM (stepping motor) plus something they call “closed-loop monitoring”. The idea seems to be that the autofocus system is doing real-time adjustments to assure greater precision. This is the first such language I’ve seen, so I’m not quite sure if this is actually unique for autofocus lenses or just their particular way of articulating something that is actually common among autofocus systems. I’m not complaining, however, as I do feel like accuracy is the greatest strength of this AF system.

Getting good focus precision with such a big maximum aperture is obviously important, so I appreciate them nailing this important aspect of lens design.

This will be the Moonlit 50mm F1.2’s greatest area of deficiency against its competition, however. The Sigma 50mm F1.2 and Sony 50mm F1.4 GM both employ dual high powered linear-style motors to drive focus, while the 50mm F1.2 GM employs QUAD XD linear motors. The single STM focus motor employed here is just not going to be able to match those lenses for thrust and smoothness.

That’s not to say that what we’ve got here is bad news. While AF speed may not be as instant as some of the best lenses, focus moves back and forth smoothly and quickly in my formal tests. You can see focus happening rather than it just arriving instantly, but focus lock comes quickly. What’s more, focus seems well damped, which will serve the lens well in the video autofocus section.

Focus precision was also excellent, with my portrait tests showing perfect precision even when the eyes weren’t looking fight at the camera.

Here’s another F1.2 portrait that shows excellent focus precision even at F1.2:

Here’s a shot of Ferrari that also shows excellent focus precision.

I was pleasantly surprised to actually get fairly good results when shooting bees going in and out of one of my hives.

In general, while autofocus wasn’t as fast or smooth as the best lenses in this class, this is actually a fairly strong performance for what matters. Anyone wanting to using the SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 for weddings or portraits will have no complaints about AF. I wouldn’t buy this lens for dedicated sports or high speed action use. This lens will face Sony’s limitations on burst speed with full time autofocus as do all third party lenses.* If high speed action is on your 50mm F1.2 agenda for some reason, save up and buy the Sony GM lens (or buy the excellent 50mm F1.4 GM instead).

*Burst speed is capped at 15FPS with non-Sony lenses.

Video AF

As noted in the previous section, autofocus isn’t instant but it is well damped. That serves the Moonlit 50mm F1.2 well for video work. Video focus pulls were smooth and confident with no visible stepping on either my a7RV or Alpha 1 bodies. Focus breathing is noticeable, however, and this is not a lens that will receive any focus breathing compensation because it isn’t a Sony lens. If your video work involved big focus pulls, you probably want to look elsewhere.

My hand test (where I alternately block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then remove it to allow focus to move to my face) went fairly well, with confident transitions back and forth.

I used the lens for shooting a few YouTube episodes, and saw stable results whenever I was static on camera or even when approaching the camera. Likewise my static shots of landscapes were stable, with no pulsing or jumping around.

The focus breathing is really the only significant downside here.

Image Quality Breakdown

In this section we start to see the real strength of the new SongRaw lens, as while it isn’t the sharpest of the three 50mm F1.2 lenses, it manages to stay close while also providing a really lovely bokeh rendering. This is an optical design of 15 elements in 10 groups, with 7 High Refractive (HR) elements, 4 Extra-low Dispersion (ED) elements, and 2 Aspherical (ASPH) elements. That leaves only two ordinary elements in the whole design; this is a sophisticated optical design. The MTF chart is a bit interesting, as rather than a linear fade from the center to the corner we instead see a bit of a roller coaster ride up and down. The F4 chart on the right shows a more traditional optic signature.

I decided to compare the Sigma 50mm F1.2 ART to the SongRaw, and found that the Sigma has about a 10% advantage in raw sharpness most of the time.

There is always a tension with lenses like this, as while sharpness and contrast are admirable qualities, sometimes the endless pursuit of flawlessly corrected perfection ends up robbing lenses of their “soul”. They produce technically perfect images that aren’t compelling for some reason. I think that SongRaw has done a good job engineering a lens with a nice balance, as the lens is sharp enough to provide compelling images even on my high resolution Sony cameras, but still manages to have a lot of personality.

We’ll dive into the technicalities, including vignette and distortion.

There are some mixed reviews here. The amount of distortion is small but not linear. The inner lines are near perfect, but there is some pincushion effect right near the edge of the frame. Any attempt to manually correct the pincushion distortion introduces some barrel distortion, so I’ve left it uncorrected. Hopefully a correction profile (when it becomes available) will correct that. For perspective, however, I will point out that the Sigma 50mm F1.2 ART actually has a hair more distortion and only a hair less vignette.

I needed a +73 to correct the vignette, while the Sigma needed a +64 to correct. Not really a meaningful difference between the two.

Testing for longitudinal chromatic aberrations (LoCA) shows only a tiny amount of fringing before the plane of focus.

I often shoot my Dad’s old SLR because it really exaggerates fringing. There is a minimal amount of fringing that shows up on some of the high contrast areas.

I also saw zero issues with LaCA (lateral chromatic aberrations), which shows up along the edges of the frame. All of the transitions here are very neutral and show excellent contrast from black to white.

Nothing cornering here. It’s not an exceptional performance in terms of vignette and distortion, but is what I would call an average performance for this class of lens.

So how about resolution and contrast? My formal tests are done on the 61MP Sony a7RV.

The MTF suggests that this is going to be ebbs and flows in terms of detail and contrast across the frame. Is that what we find? Here’s the test chart at F1.2:

Here are crops from across the frame at F1.2 and shown at a 200% magnification.

The center and midframe look excellent, while the corners look a bit shaky. Out of curiosity, I tried focusing in the corners, and I definitely saw better corner results when focusing into the corners.

Focusing into the corners produced better corner results but made the center results worse, so the lens doesn’t have a particularly flat plane of focus. The good news, however, is that you’ll get good results in the area you’re focusing even if your composition is near the edge of the frame…just not even sharpness everywhere else. In most situations, however, that won’t matter. Here’s an F1.2 shot focused right near the edge of the frame, and you can see that while contrast isn’t off the charts, the contrast and detail in general look good.

For a point of comparison, here’s a look at how the Moonlit 50mm compares to the Sigma 50mm F1.2 ART.

I don’t have the Sigma on hand to do fresh comparisons, but at least as far as my test chart goes, the SongRaw does an effective job of mostly matching performance everywhere save perhaps the corners for reasons we’ve already discussed.

I found that my impressions of sharpness and contrast did vary a bit depending on composition and lighting. We can see from the MTF chart that there are ebbs and flows in sharpness and contrast across the frame anyway, and I do think that microcontrast varies as well. In many shots I was very impressed by the microcontrast, as here.

In other shots, however, I could see a bit more astigmatism, with a bit of a haze on textures.

Still, in most situations I think that photographers will be very happy with the detail and contrast even at F1.2.

Stopping down to F1.4 produces only insignificant improvements to sharpness and contrast, but a more meaningful jump is available at F1.8:

Center sharpness nears its peak by F2, but you could see further improvement to the midframe at F2.8.

You can see that the midframe is truly exceptional by F2.8.

But when I looked up into the corners, I would say the corners were

Even in this range, landscapes look awesome, though depth of field might not include everything in focus.

From F2.8 to F8 the chart results are exceptional, with pin sharp results all across the frame. This is a stronger performance than many lenses are capable of. I check it against the Sigma 35mm F1.2 ART II that I was reviewing at a similar time and found that the Moonlit 50mm F1.2 was the match of the excellent Sigma in sharpness and contrast.

Diffraction will start to take a bite out of contrast by F11, but more noticeably by the minimum aperture of F16.

So sharpness and contrast are good, but how about bokeh and general rendering? At its best, the SongRaw delivers gorgeous bokeh.

I’m less enamored when there are bright specular highlights, however. The geometry is excellent, but the “bokeh balls” themselves are fairly busy.

If you shoot a lot of photos with bright specular highlights, there are better choices. For my type of nature photography, however, I would say the bokeh is lovely.

You can definitely create that amazing subject isolation possible from a 50mm F1.2 lens:

One final shot shows a lot of different layers, including a bit in the transition zone. I’ll let you determine your thoughts on the rendering.

Flare resistance isn’t bad wide open, but can get a little uglier stopped down. The final example (at F11) shows a fairly overpowering ghosting artifact.

If you shoot right into the sun you will get a weird halo effect that begins at F2.8 and becomes very pronounced by small apertures like F11.

While I don’t mind the flare effects I get at wide apertures, I’m not a fan of the flare issues at smaller apertures. SongRaw’s coatings can’t match Sigma’s, and are definitely not at the superior standard set by the G Master.

I’ll also note that I felt like the colors were very slightly skewed towards cool/magenta tones. I preferred the portrait results after warming the image a bit (+500 kelvin) and moving the tint slider back 7 points towards green (from +25 to +18).

Portraits generally came out looking great, however, and I see that as being the single best application for this lens.

I was able to get some night sky images and got some great captures of the Milky Way. There’s a bit of coma in the corners, but nothing extreme. This is a good option because of the tremendous light gathering potential.

This isn’t a flawless lens, but SongRaw set its sights on some of the best lenses in the class and a did a pretty compelling job of delivering equally good optical results at a lower price. Here’s a look at a gallery of images for you to enjoy.

Conclusion

I’m always delighted to see new lens makers enter the market, and even more delighted to review a 50mm F1.2 lens, as this is a fantastically versatile focal length and aperture combination. Most new lensmakers enter the market on the bottom end, making inexpensive lenses that are more likely than not manual focus only. They work their way up to developing autofocus and more sophisticated features, releasing more premium lenses after they have developed a reputation for themselves. Not SongRaw. They are jumping right into the deep end, delivering a big, heavy, feature rich Sigma ART/Sony G Master competitor. And they’ve done a pretty amazing job – the Moonlit 50mm F1.2 AF lens is a stellar performer in just about every metric.

But selling a $1000 lens is much easier once one has developed a reputation for reliability and customer support. Viltrox has arguably been the most successful of the Chinese brands over the past ten years, and despite producing a lot of amazing lenses, I still encounter some skepticism from some of my audience as to the long term durability of their lenses and whether or not Viltrox will stand by them. That’s the kind of perception challenge that SongRaw is going to face.

There’s no question that the SongRaw Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is an excellent lens (as I hope the images in this review attest to), but after three weeks with the lens (and the company), I have no insight into the long term reliability of the lens or even SongRaw’s viability as a company. My first impressions are favorable, however, as while there are a few areas where there is room for improvement, the Moonlit 50mm F1.2 is an awesome lens that I would happily use as a portrait or wedding photographer. If you’ve been wanting a 50mm F1.2 lens but can’t afford the Sigma or Sony options, consider the SongRaw. You just might fall in love with it.

Pros:

Very successful first lens
Tough, durable build
Feature rich lens
Thorough weather sealing
Accurate and well damped focus
Video AF quite good
Low distortion
Near perfect control of aberrations
Very good sharpness wide open
Amazing sharpness stopped down
Lovely bokeh
Great subject isolation
Considerably cheaper than alternatives

Cons:

Bigger and heavier than Sigma or Sony
Autofocus isn’t as sophisticated as alternatives
Specular highlights are busy
Some flare issues

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the SongRaw 50mm F1.2 @ SongRaw | B&H Photo |

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