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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott and I'm here today to give you a first look and a hands-on overview of the
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Samyang AF 35mm f1.4. This is for Sony FE or full-frame mirrorless and I'll be taking a look
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at it primarily on a Sony a7R Mark III. Now as you can see from the box itself, AF is kind of a big
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thing at Samyang these days and makes sense as that their previous development had been
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exclusively on manual everything lenses. At one point, they began to make a transition towards
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you know, electronic electromagnetically controlled apertures. And so in that process to start to get XF information transmitted. But more recently in the last couple of years
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they have started to actually develop autofocusing lenses. Now at this point
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They have done a few Canon EF mount, I think one Nikon F mount, but primarily they've developed
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starting on the Sony FE platform. Now, I've actually looked at one of these lenses previously
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the 50mm F1.4, which I did as a part of a three-part comparison earlier on at the beginning
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of this year. And by the way, I do hope down the road to take a look at a 35mm comparison here as
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well. And I've already, you know, kind of started to make preliminary arrangements. I definitely know
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I can get the Sigma 35mm f1.4 ART in Sony FE. And I'm trying to arrange for the Sony Zeiss 35mm
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f1.4 as well. But at the moment, I have too many other ongoing projects to even tackle that. And so
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for the moment, I'll be doing a straight up review of the 35mm f1.4 Samyang lens. Now I do have
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And what I've been using on Sony for when I want to shoot 35mm is I've been using the Canon 35mm F1.4 L Mark II via an MC-11 or similar adapter on a Sony body, which works reasonably well for different subjects
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But I've been really interested in this 35mm lens for one thing because I really do love the 35mm focal length
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I think if I had to live with just one focal length, which I hope to never have to be in that position
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but if I were to choose just one walk-around focal length, it would probably be 35mm
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and particularly a lens with a wide aperture that allows you to, if you want to get close to things
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to throw backgrounds out of focus. And 35mm lenses, particularly f1.4 ones, are certainly capable of producing a very nice bokeh quality
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and throwing backgrounds out of focus. but also it's just great for a lot of things. You can do environmental portraiture. You can
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do things like landscape, obviously, or in the city. It's just a great focal length. And so I've
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been very intrigued in taking a look at this. So we're going to jump in right now, and I'm going
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to give you a closer hands-on look at the build and the design, and I'll show you a few initial
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images from the lens here as well. Let's jump in. Let's take a closer look
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So the Samyang AF 35mm f1 is obviously a pretty fair sized lens In fact when it comes to some of the direct lenses that I might compare it to it is essentially as long or longer than any of them And so as far
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as the Sony Distagon, Sony Zeiss Distagon 35 millimeter goes, it is 112 millimeters in length
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The Samyang here is 115 millimeters in length, or 4.53 inches. Now, it is a little bit narrower in diameter compared to the Sony Zeiss
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The Sony Zeiss has a 72-millimeter front filter thread. We've got a 67-millimeter front filter thread here, which, by the way, is shared with, you know
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say, like the Sigma 35-millimeter f1.4 on the Sony FE mount. Now, of course, with the Sigma lenses, without having it on hand, it's a little bit hard to nail down what the dimensions and weight will be in Sony FE mount, because they haven't been great at updating that information for FE
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And so, one thing is clear, however, and that is that the Sigma will be the heaviest of any of these lenses, and I suspect it will come in somewhere around 770 grams
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This one comes in at 645 grams, and that is 1.42 pounds
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And so that's actually a hair, not much, not enough. I mean, it's negligibly heavier than the Distagon lens, which is 630 grams or 1.39 pounds
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So 15 grams is not really a big deal in the big scheme of things. It is interesting, however, in that the Distagon does have, you know
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It has a manual aperture ring here that the Samyang lacks. It also has internal weather sealing, which, again, the Samyang lacks
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There's no gasket here. There's no internal seals. And so, anyway, you have a fairly hefty lens
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I think where you're getting that weight, however, is that this lens has a lot of great glass in it
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And as I found with the 50mm F1.4 Samyang, when I compared it to the Sony Zeiss Planar 50mm F1.4, which I own
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I found that the Samyang actually had better light transmission. And also, it had softer bokeh back highlights, even at equal distances
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and they were larger circles, which tells me that it has a good-sized maximum aperture and
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kind of entrance pupil, and also it is nice and bright. I think we're going to find that the same
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is true with the Samyang 35AF. In fact, in comparison even to a really, really excellent
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35mm lens, frankly, I think one of the very best out there is this Canon 35mm f1.4. I have found
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that to be true. And so it is a heavy lens, but of course it's a heavy lens because it
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does have a lot going for it optically. Now, as far as the build goes, this is, the barrel is
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actually made, I believe, of engineered plastics. However, the design and the kind of the feel of
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them is premium enough that, frankly, it's hard for me to determine whether or not it's actually
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plastics or a metal alloy. Others have noted that it is a plastic, so I'll take their word. But
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as far as the actual feel this is really high stuff and it feels and looks really fantastic It kind of a minimalist design as you can see there are no external switches here There is nothing outside of a manual focus ring here
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And so a very, you know, kind of sleek design. But frankly, I find it a very, very appealing kind of look
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And if you look at it compared to, say, the Canon lens here, this actually looks kind of like the more modern, sophisticated type look
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and I even like its red accent ring a little bit better. Sorry, Canon, it seems sacrilegious to say that of the famed red ring
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but as far as just the general aesthetics of it, I actually like the Samyang look quite well there
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As we saw, it has a metal lens mount, certainly a number of metal internal components
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That's part of why it is a heftier lens, but not a whole lot going out here on the surface
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As noted, there's a 67mm filter thread up front. It does come with a little protection pouch and also comes with a plastic petal-shaped lens hood here
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And of course, particularly when you've got the lens hood mounted on there, here's on a Sony A7R Mark III
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It's a pretty big affair that we are working with here. There are nine rounded aperture blades that help with retained circular highlights
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It is an auto-focusing lens, as we have noted. However, it does not have an image stabilizer
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Of course, none of the lenses in this class, 35mm f1.4 options on Sony do
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That's really not much of a big deal because of having the steady shot inside or the in-body image stabilization in a number of the Sony bodies for which this lens is designed for
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It has a minimum focus distance of 0.3 meters or right under a foot, so you can get nice and close
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and it has a 0.17 times magnification, which is useful, but does lag a little bit behind the
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Distagon at 0.18. That's the Sony Zeiss. And so it gives you a little bit more magnification and
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the Sigma 35 art a little bit more yet 0.19 times magnification. The Canon is a little bit better
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than that. I think it's somewhere around 0.20 times. And so anyway, but certainly a useful
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figure. And that's part of what I enjoyed using lenses like this for is getting in nice and close
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Now, as I've noted, this lens does not have, does not have an AF MF switch. And so of course I
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mapped that to just onto the body with the down arrow there. But I wanted to show you this just
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to give you a look at the actual behavior of the focus ring, which unfortunately is not as
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precise as what, in terms of the feel and the kind of the damping on it when you're wanting to do
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fine tuning. It's fine for major focus shifts, but I find that when I'm really trying to fine tune
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that I don't like the behavior as well as what I do on some other lenses. And so the manual focus
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ring itself is not necessarily at the top of the heap. Now one thing that I will credit Samyang for
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is that while they are new to doing autofocus, they are continuing to work to refine this
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And so I kind of gave the 50mm F1 a bit of a shellacking when it came to the autofocus performance on it compared to the competitors I was looking at But I will note that they continue to do updating to the lens firmware And so for example although this lens is relatively recent
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we're already on firmware version 03. And so they're continuing to refine the autofocus
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performance. And I know that from talk to Sam Yang's engineers that they are continuing to
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refine that process to try to improve it even further. And so the good news is, is that they
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are working. And I think that we will see some ongoing improvements as we move ahead. Now let's
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just look for a second at the autofocus sound. And so I want you to just be able to hear it does
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It's not silent, but neither is it loud. In fact, the biggest thing I find is that if you're in
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AFC mode. It continues to make a slight kind of scratchy sound. However, if you go into a single
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shot mode, you have that tiny little scratching noise, but for the most part, autofocus happens
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so quickly that it's quite silent by nature. And so the by-product of that is that I have no real
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reservations about the autofocus speed, and I'll detail more about the autofocus itself as we move
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ahead. We'll be breaking down the image quality in the next episode. And so stay tuned for those
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things because I think that really that's where this lens has a lot going for it. And particularly
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at the price point that it occupies and, you know, at full MSRP pop in the U.S. market
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it's under $800, but I've seen it fairly frequently at the $600 or even less price range on sale
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And of course, at that price point, it's a pretty fantastic bargain, particularly when you
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consider that you know I put paid close to two thousand dollars for the Canon when it came out
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and the Sony Zeiss sits at fifteen hundred dollars and so certainly a very very strong
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price to performance ratio that we'll detail more as we move ahead. In the meantime why don't you
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look at the description down below and there's a link to an image gallery. I've actually been
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shooting with this lens for a number of weeks already. I've just had so much other content to
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pour out that I've not been able to share anything with you. But byproduct of that is I've already
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got a lot of really great images that I'm proud of that I think you'll enjoy looking at. So take
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a look at those to get a sense. I always like personally, if I'm interested in a lens, I like
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to look at photos that other people have taken. I realize that it's got their own style and their
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own processing involved. But at the same time, I also start to get a feel for what a lens is
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capable of in the hands of, you know, hopefully somebody who knows how to use it. And I hope to
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be able to do the same for you if you look at my image gallery there. You can also find buying links
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in the description down below to a number of different retailers. So if you'd like to get one
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for yourself, feel free to jump in there and do so. And stay tuned because I will be back with an
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image quality episode and then my wrap-up review that I'll be coming back to you with very shortly
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I'm Dustin Abbott, and if you'll look in the description down below, you can also find links to follow me on social media or sign up for my newsletter, become a patron and help to support
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this channel and of course if you haven't already please click that subscribe button
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thanks for watching have a great day
