Schneider-KREUZNACH x LK Samyang 14-24mm F2.8 FE Review | Impressive!

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[Music]
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hi I'm Dustin Abbott It's been more than two years since I've done a Samyang review and I didn't know if I'd ever
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ended up doing one again However I happened to be in Tokyo at CP+ stopped
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by their booth just to uh get a little facetime and turns out that they were announcing a brand new lens a brand new
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partnership In that 2-year period uh Samyang has completely rebranded as LK
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Samyang And this lens was a partnership with the legendary German optical
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company Schneider Cruz And so I was very interested at this collaboration because
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it showed a seriousness of intent of maybe moving a little bit more upscale with with this zoom and in particular
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when I looked at a zoom range that I love 14 to 24 millimeters with a maximum
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aperture of f2.8 eight and saw that they had managed to dramatically shrink the
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footprint and the weight of the lens adding the ability to use traditional screw-in filters and on top of that
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having a lens that has a really fantastic minimum focus distance and uplose performance And I was very
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intrigued and I hoped that I would have an opportunity to spend a little bit more time than just a few minutes at a
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booth with it Well fortunately I have at this point This is the most expensive LK
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Samyang lens that I've ever tested at $1,200 So as they've moved a little bit
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more up market with this lens is it worth that kind of money well that's what we're here to explore in today's
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review We're going to dive into that right after a word from our sponsor Today's episode is sponsored by the
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dustin20 for 20% off Now before we start the review proper I do want to give you
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disclosure This lens was sent to me by LK Samiang for testing and review They
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have had no input on my review itself nor are they seeing this review before you do As always this is a completely
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independent review So let's talk about the build and design here First of all I definitely noted a different look when I
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was doing the unboxing A little more upscale experience and definitely different uh fonts and logos a part of
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the process itself I reviewed the Sigma 14 to 24 millimeter f2.8 art a year
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after I had reviewed their 14 to 24 millimeter on DSLR So that was 2018 and
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2019 Actually loved both of those lenses I thought they were really fantastic and they were my favorite of the Sigma wide
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angle zooms But the one downside of the 14 to 24 millimeter DN art lens was is
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it was quite big and heavy And of course its design meant that no traditional filtering could be used And I actually
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even reviewed some rear filtering options uh to try to circumvent that as a part of the process It was 32% longer
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and it was a whopping 78% heavier than this lens And so uh they have done
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something really significant in this Schneider LK Samyang partnership in reducing the footprint of this lens I
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think making it a much more accessible lens to a wide wide variety of people I love the idea of the size and weight of
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this lens because this is the kind of lens that I often would like to take when I'm traveling Whether you're doing
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city related thing or landscape related um photography in both of those cases
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having a wide angle zoom like this is really fantastic But if the lens is too big and too heavy to pack along you know
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sometimes it's going to get left aside and I'm going to pack a compact prime instead And so I love the idea of this
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lens if the reality holds up It is 84 mm or 3.2 in in diameter and it is 98.6 mm
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or 3.9 in in length Now what's interesting is that they are giving you the actual longer focal length There is
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a very mild inner barrel extension actually at 14 mm which retracts fully
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by 24 mm And so at the 24 millimeter position it's actually only 88.8 mm in
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length and so making it about 12 mm shorter And so that obviously increases
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the gap even further when it comes to other lenses at how compact this can be for travel It also weighs in at only 445
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gram or 15.7 O which is a really fantastic weight for this kind of
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extreme wide angle zoom Very very impressive And it is still just as wide
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It goes as wide as 114.2° and then zooms into 84 degrees
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That's identical to the Sigma So it's not like they've cheated in the zoom range in any kind of way Now equally
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fantastic is the fact that up front we have a very common 77mm front filter
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thread We have a lens hood that is removable and reversible for storage Uh
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again that's a a lot of fantastic because it means also that you have a tradential traditional pinch uh cap for
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the front rather than one of those larger caps that has to fit over the whole fixed lens hood assembly So as far
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as portability this gets fantastic marks all across the board Just to give you another point of comparison not on Sony
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FE but on Nikon Zmount the Nicor uh they also have a 14 to 24 millimeter f2.8 It
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is 125 or excuse me 124.5 millime in length and weighs 650 gram and so
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considerably longer considerably heavier The uh that lens cost $2,000 The Sigma
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costs a little over $1,500 And this lens at $1,200 while that's up market for an
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LK Samianging lens it's still a relative bargain compared to the other options
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that cover this focal length and maximum aperture combination And so is it a
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plastic fantastic then you know it's not It's the len the build quality feels good It does have some density to it And
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there is a combination of metals and then also some engineered plastics But you can feel when you tap them or when
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you try to squeeze it is all good quality materials The uh overall design is clean We'll talk a little bit more
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about the rings in just a moment but they've got a chrome accent ring They've got a hidden blue ring here instead of a
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hidden red ring And I don't know if that is a pointing towards the the German part of the collaboration here or what
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but anyway a a slightly different optical design and a little bit different a look but you know
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beautifully compact and uh build quality feels just fine That includes uh a
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thorough weather sealing with seven different seal points inside the lens itself And now we have a sealed USB C
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port as well And that's kind of the same approach that Tamron uses where it's it's exposed but it is a weather sealed
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port And in this case what that allows you to do is to finally get away from the lens station which has been a part
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of the reality with Samyang lenses And so for doing firmware updates or other customizable tweaks you can do that
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without having that dock which is a fantastic move by Samian And so you do
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have the ability to tweak a some of the function and not just do firmware updates but you know customize some of
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the function And so that includes uh one of the things that I did is I changed the speed of the manual focus ring which
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was a little bit fast for my taste And so I slowed that down and that helped And then another option that you had is
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that you can control what the AFMF switch does And so um rather than it just being do kind of do the ring doing
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nothing during AF mode you can program it as I did And so you can use it as an aperture ring if you so desire Obviously
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when you switch to MF it's just going to become the manual focus ring once again So it allows it to behave a little bit
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like Nikon's customizable control ring though with maybe fewer options attached to it but I found that to be beneficial
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as well As mentioned we do have that AFMF switch and we do have a function or custom button Works just like you know
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any other lens function is set from within the camera itself The zoom ring
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is a you know it's it's not a big throw I estimate it to be around 30° and so
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you can do that fairly quickly Now if you're moving really slowly I find that
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the the weight is mostly consistent it just changes a little bit at around 21
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mm and that's when the lens is fully retracted But even so as I've been using the lens it's it's already smoothed out
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and so it's making it easier and easier to zoom in and out while doing um you
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know during video for example And so I appreciate that that it's getting it's it's improving in the overall field The
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manual focus ring the uh it's got a kind of a very old school rubberized texture
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It kind of reminds me of some of Canon's old L series lenses from the EF uh era
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and and so I don't necessarily love the aesthetic of it However the feel is fine
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It's a little light for my taste but it feels fine overall And uh and obviously very different textures here to
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distinguish between these two rings Now one of the other kind of killer features here is that you can focus as closely at
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eight as 18 cm and at on the 24 mm end That is going to give you a maximum
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magnification of 0.26 times And that blows away any of the competing lenses all of which live
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at the 0.13 or 0.14 level And so you get a much higher level of magnification
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with this lens And it's actually quite good up close And so that just opens up I love lenses like this because it opens
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up a whole lot of different possibilities for what you can do in as far as storytelling when you're out with
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a lens like this You have nine rounded aperture blades inside You know
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obviously it's a wide angle lens so you're not going to see a whole lot of big specular highlights out of it but it does a reasonable job of keeping a
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circular shape And what's more as you stop the lens down that turns into an 18-pointed sunstar that looks good Not
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best I've ever seen but looks good enough No problems there Overall this is an amazingly attractive package I would
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say particularly because of that compact size ability to filter it and those close focus capabilities How about the
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autofocus side that hasn't always been you know Sam's talk strength but in the
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two years since I've last done a review I'm pretty impressed by how good this lens is It uses a linear STM focus motor
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and the focus is very fast very close to instant in fact in terms of speed It is
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truly silent Silent in the sense that I put it up next to my ear and did a lot of focusing and I still couldn't hear
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anything and it focused very accurately So no problems there Sometimes when it
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comes to tracking a subject with a wide angle lens it's a little bit more complicated particularly if you're trying to shoot at a wider um maximum
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aperture because a lot of times the subject isn't occupying a big enough part of the frame for the AI tracking to
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really lock on until it gets relatively close But a lot of times it doesn't matter so much because the depth of
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field is going to be big enough that unless you're really focused on the wrong point the subject may be in focus
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anyway And so I I mean again I haven't really test had the opportunity to test it in like a sports type setting but
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focus speed is certainly there And so if the focus algorithms are doing the job I don't see why you shouldn't be able to
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do that I found that focus actually was good whether I was shooting up close which is nice Lots of good when it comes
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to stills I saw none of the pulsing that I've sometimes seen with wide angle lenses when shooting at landscape
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distances and at smaller apertures It's just really really good Very well executed And so I I love that progress
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for Samyang And when it comes to the video side of things I was also impressed with the autofocus performance
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The focus pools are very good and confident Uh they're smooth There's no
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pulsing or visible steps All of that was very good Focus breathing is very low from this lens which is fantastic for
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video work It isn't par focal and you'll notice here as I zoom in and out that
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there is uh there's moments in that process where things are out of focus before it quickly you know refocuses And
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so if you're looking for a par focal lens unfortunately this is not it However what I did find is that when
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just kind of moving naturally from one subject to another not kind of focusing a pull by touch I found that the focus
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pools were they're nicely cinematic It's not like this you know abrupt kind of
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thing but there's just a nice cinematic pull to it So I actually think this is going to be a really great gimbal lens
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because of that small compact size And again it's short enough that with a lot of gimbals you could do inception mode
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or things like that It's going to be a great vlog vlogging lens because of having a great focal length for that and
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the ability to zoom you know and because the zoom is just it's a very small area and the lens is so lightweight You can
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zoom in and out and you're not going to have to worry about messing with uh rebalancing a gimbal It's it's going to
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be such a minor change that the motors are going to be able to compensate for that without any problem And so uh I think it's going to be a really really
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nice lens for video work for a number of reasons there How about the image
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quality itself you know it's the question is is how much input does the Schneider Cruz Knox have on this lens
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anyway and and I did try to to plum those depths and I didn't necessarily
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get a a clear picture Uh it is it is clear that from both ends of the spectrum that this is a collaboration
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that they are work have worked on that and it looks like there's at least one other zoom lens that will be coming down the pipeline as a part of this
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collaboration But certainly there is some input from the Schneider side of things And so let's look at what the
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outcome is This is an optical design of 15 elements in 11 groups That includes five high refractive index elements
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three aspherical lenses and three extra low dispersion elements And so the
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majority of that optical design is exotic elements If we look at the MTF we find that there is it's a it's a very
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strong MTF at 14 mm Though it's not what you would call flat It's a bit of up and down However all of that up and down is
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within a very high threshold particularly in the center of the frame it is remarkably sharp Very very sharp
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And then at the 24mm end it starts off extremely sharp but it's more of a linear decline towards the the corners
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Now if I throw in the Sigma comparison remember that the Sigma is number one excellent and it is much much larger
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What we find is that the LK Samyang lens is sharper in the center on both ends of the zoom range But what I find whether
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at 14 millimeters or 24 millimeters is that while there's not a big difference in the percentage between the two the
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Sigma is more consistent It's more of a flat rather than up and down in its performance And so I do think that the
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Sigma is probably a more consistent optical performer in terms of sharpness and contrast But the two lenses are
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actually if you break down the overall percentage uh in terms of sharpness they're actually very very similar to
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each other Now there's the one kind of optical flaw that I can point to here is
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that there is some very strong barrel distortion at 14 mm I needed a plus 29
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to correct for that And it is somewhat of a mustache pattern It doesn't correct perfectly when you're trying to do a
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manual correction Now to be fair the recently released Sony 16mm f1.8 it
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actually needed even 1 percentage more of of distortion correction at you know
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just 16 mm and this being 14 mm And so I mean you know there's that Also it has
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very heavy vignette on the 14 millimeter end I needed a plus 91 not quite maxing it out but not far from it to correct
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for that when doing a manual correction Now the good news is is that it seems
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like they have managed to have better profile support for this lens than what I've seen for necessarily for previous
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Samyang lenses And so it seems to me like uh number one you're getting full in camera support for JPEGs and videos
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And so you know the real world issue is not really much of an issue because of those good in camera corrections There
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is a profile available uh to download for Lightroom ACR things like that And
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so that you can uh you know correct for raw files And so I mean there is some
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electronic help but certainly there is some raw strong distortion there As you
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start to zoom in that goes away and and so by the time you get to the 24 millimeter end you've actually gone to
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the tiniest a minus one of pin cushion distortion and vignette is much lower at
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just a plus 43 Now on much more positive aspects
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Number one you do have almost no longitudinal style chromatic aberrations And so that's great Uh and so that's
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going to help with contrast Then wide angle lenses are far more likely to suffer with the lateral style chromatic
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aberrations near the edge of the frame And fortunately that did not seem to be a problem either I didn't see any issues
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with longitudinal chromatic aber excuse me lateral style chromatic aberration either on my chart or out in real world
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use And so that's fantastic On the sharpness side of things I found that at 14 millimeters it is extremely sharp in
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the center Extremely sharp It is still very very good in the mid-frame and the corners are relatively good Um good
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compared to a lot of other wide angle lenses uh but not obviously as anywhere near as good as what the center
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performance is I was kind of intrigued and unfortunately the when I did the
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review of the Sigma it was so many years ago it was before my current testing methods and so I couldn't really use
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that as a benchmark you know not same resolution back then different process different chart etc but I did go back to
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the more recent review of the Sony 16 to35 millimeter f2.8 8 Mark II and
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that's a G Master lens A very very good lens optically In the center of the frame the Samyang is actually sharper
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even though it is going wider obviously than 16 mm And then if I moved over to
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the corners I found that the GM lens is brighter in the corners obviously but as
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terms of the sharpness and contrast it's really kind of a wash between the two lenses And so that just gives you a benchmark to let you know this is a very
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very good optical instrument at 14 millimeters And so what I found is that as I stopped it down you don't see a big
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improvement in a lot of the frame by f5.6 the corners are looking very very good Center you're basically not going
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to get any better than what you get at f2.8 However as you stop down you will see it just the performance kind of even
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out across the frame And so by f5.6 you can get great looking landscape images with detail all across the frame even on
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a 61 megapixel body So that is fantastic You're going to see the typical issues with defraction Defraction starts to
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show up by f11 and minimum aperture here is f22 It's going to be pretty obvious by f-22 what defraction has done I found
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as I begin to zoom into the range that I got a more even performance at 17 and 18 mm You know corners are brightening up A
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little bit more consistent performance there 20 mm also looking very very good Very strong performance And at 20
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millimeters I would say I saw the sharpest corners of what I've seen very quickly by about f4 Corners looked
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really great At 24 millimeters resolution is obviously still very good but contrast isn't quite as good at f2.8
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I found that if I stopped down to f4 however that contrast came right back in and images looked really really good In
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fact I found that I was actually very pleasantly surprised by how good the lens was at 24 millime f2.8 8 in
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close-up work and not maybe macro levels of contrast and you know the acuity of
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those fine details but it really did a a very compelling job there And you can
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actually get a little bit of bokeh out of this lens because you can focus so closely And the quality of that background blur is really fairly
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pleasant for a wide angle lens So great job there as well Colors look good out
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of the lens I suspect that at least some of the optical glass may have come through Schneider and we have very very
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nice results there I found that the coma is very well controlled Samyang has
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traditionally done quite well with this So they tend to be good lenses for shooting astro or night sky and that's
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no different here So this is going to be a really compelling lens particularly for those that are maybe backpacking out
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to great locations to do astro work um this package is obviously going to be very compelling for that I also found
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that flare resistance a bit of a mixed bag Uh the biggest thing that I noticed is that 14 millimeters if you compose in
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a certain way going to get a kind of a a halo around the moon uh kind of light leak effect towards the very edge of the
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frame if you compose in just certain way If I zoomed in a bit uh that went away obviously and you couldn't see it
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However I I would say that the more you stop the lens down if I you shoot it you
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know a lot of times I test wide open and at f11 definitely at f11 I saw more flare artifacts more pronounced flare
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artifacts And in the middle of that range kind of the more typical place I actually shoot f5.6 for example for
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landscapes not really much of a big deal And so you know there are some potential issues but they are avoidable there So
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my conclusion is this I think that this is a very triumphant return for Samyang
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or now LK Samyang It gives basically all of the Sigma's performance in a cheaper
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lighter smaller and more versatile package The ability to use filters I think could be a gamecher for certain
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people And also as I've mentioned the compact nature of allowing people to take that into more more spaces because
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it is easy to bring along I think is going to be a very compelling reason The question I guess to be answered is
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is the market going to be ready for a $1,200 Samyang lens even if it has
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Schneider branding on it and I guess we're going to find out what the market will bear It does seem that Samyang LK
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Samyang still needs to work on a little bit of their North American distribution and maybe iron out a few of those tweaks
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However if you can get your hands on this lens I think it's a pretty fantastic lens I'm personally very very
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intrigued by this lens and the package that it comes in Now if you want a more
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information you can either check out my full text review that's linked in the description down below There's linkage to an image gallery if you want to see
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more photos And if you want a deeper dive into the optical performance well stay tuned with me right now and we're
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going to jump into that together Okay we'll start by taking a quick look at this focal range And so as you can see
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we're going from 14 mm to 24 mm And so that's a lot of different framing
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options for the same scene As mentioned our worst optical uh flaw in this lens
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is the amount of barrel distortion and vignette that's present at 14 mm So you can see it is strongly pronounced in
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terms of the barrel distortion And you can see after I've tried to manually correct it it has a little bit of that wavy mustache pattern there And so it
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doesn't correct perfectly You have to correct the centers you end up overcorrecting the corners Fortunately
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the correction profile does a cleaner job of that because it is tailored to this And then the vignette is a plus 92
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which is a lot And the one thing I don't like is there's just almost a little bit of like a discoloration where it's
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whatever the color balance isn't quite the same there in the corners Again it doesn't seem to be as much of an issue
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out in real world shots Now when we get to the telephoto end we can see that all of that distortion has essentially gone
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away and it's almost completely neutral the tiniest amount of pin cushion distortion It's not even worth correcting but you can with a minus one
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Vignette is much lower at a plus 43 to get this correct result in the corners
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Longitudinal style chromatic aberrations are not a problem You can see very neutral before and quite neutral after
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tiniest bit of green fringing there If I take a look here on this uh SLR we can
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see as we look towards any of the shiny and reflective surfaces elsewhere very very little fringing to see It is uh
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does a really good job of correcting for all of that This shot is another in which often I'll see some kind of
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fringing before and after the plane of focus You can see not only is it there but there's also really good detail and
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contrast holding up very nicely Not an issue with the lateral style chromatic aberrations as well A nice clean result
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there So really good marks on that front Now taking a look at resolution 14mm
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f/2.8 This is 61 megapixels on a Sony A7R Mark II The center of the frame at
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200% magnification it looks fantastic Contrast and detail are just right at
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the top of the chart Likewise in the mid-frame it still looks very very good A little less contrast You can see it's
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still looking really excellent particularly at such a high level of magnification quite consistent from this
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corner to this corner As we look down here we can see that really truth be told even the corners look quite good
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here So for a comparison point here is the Sony 16 to 35mm uh G Master M2 in
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the center of the frame Both at 200% magnification You can see that it's the Samyang that has just a little bit more
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pop to it a little better contrast a little better detail If we look in the mid-frame the two are very very close I
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would say the GM maybe takes a little bit of an edge there And down here towards the edge the GM delivers a
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brighter result but in terms of the actual sharpness and contrast I'm going to say that the Samyang's probably a
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little bit better Now as you stop the Samyang down at 14 mm you're not really going to get any more in the center of
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the frame You've already got basically maximum from wide open What you will see is the corners get a lot brighter as you
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can see So a lot of that vignette goes away and so it just allows them to look cleaner and better By a 5.6 you're
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starting to get really clean right off into the very very corners So nice result there So for a little real world
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perspective here at 100% magnification 61 megapixels You can see everywhere you can look here in the frame fine detail
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great colors As you move off towards the edge of the frame it does get a little bit softer And part of that is due to
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maybe just a little bit of stretching towards the edge there But here on the right side you know it doesn't it's
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still it's still good It's just not as exceptionally good as when you get into this zone here I found that I could put
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on even a 10 stop ND filter as I've done here to slow down the water effect and
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give me a nice long exposure You can see that even with that detail is holding up It just it looks fantastic I mean really
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really super sharp So great result there I mean obviously these are blowing around a bit in that long exposure but I
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able to get that really great look with the water Being able to simply filter this is such a huge advantage You take a
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shot like this where you know the water is just kind of troubled To be able to get that long exposure look is fantastic
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And we can see here comparing side by side that there's still lots of detail left We're not losing resolution
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contrast just by using the filter to produce a long exposure Now as per usual
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as you stop the lens on down by about f11 it's starting to get a little softer due to defraction Still really good By
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f22 which is the minimum aperture you can see that it definitely softens everything up Moving on to 17 and 18 mm
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There you can see that uh center looks very good wide open Just fantastically
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sharp Stopping down doesn't really make it sharper Gives it just a little bit more contrast In some other places
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however here like in the mid you can see that there's just a little bit more pop Stop down And into the corners just a
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little bit brighter and a little bit more detail But already just really really good Here at 20 mm we can see
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that the center looks great from wide open Uh stopping down again doesn't really improve the center It will give
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you a little bit more pop in the mid-frame And here is definitely the best corner performance I've seen At f4
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it looks fantastic right in the corners Finally at 24 mm you can see that the
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detail is still really good but the contrast is a little bit lower Stopping down to f4 definitely gives us more
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contrast there in the center of the frame and in the mid-frame here as well It just gives a little bit more pop to
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everything Up close performance here at 24 millimeters f2.8 is really quite good
29:19
There's lots of detail being shown there Really quite impressive overall Also
29:25
color rendition uh colors look good Nice levels of saturation as you can see Really nice detail there I thought that
29:32
this image looked really really rich as well Colors looked fantastic Here we can
29:37
see as you get close to a subject you know the background blur is really quite nice for a wide-angle lens It blurs off
29:44
quite nicely Even this transition zone is handled well And the ability to get close to subjects you know you can see
29:51
that really fine depth of field there just gives you a lot more creative options when you're out taking photos to
29:58
get different kinds of shots Again this is 24 millime f/2.8 looks really quite
30:03
good overall And here like the real world contrast in this image I think looks quite good for being close You can
30:10
see that narrow plane of focus holds up well And then the bleed off to defocus is surprisingly good Uh here again this
30:17
is obviously a tiny tiny depth of field as we can see here But looking at the specular highlights they look decent Um
30:25
you know sun is handed okay in this the flare here And that kind of leads us to
30:30
it's not as great in some other settings here particularly at smaller apertures like f11 You can see a little bit more
30:37
of that you know ghosting artifacts Also seeing it here Here's that halo around
30:43
the sun effect that you can see And you have to you know either zoom it a bit to
30:49
avoid that or just compose differently I was trying to maximize it So I mean I'm trying to create the flaws Hopefully
30:54
you're not going to try to do that But here obviously looking better This shot I mean there's a little bit of ghosting
31:01
but not enough to mess it up And here this is a more typical f5.6 This is like
31:06
the actual way I would shoot with the lens And you can see there's a tiny bit of ghosting pattern No big deal there
31:12
Finally when it comes to coma you can see star points very crisp in the center of the frame As we pan off towards the
31:19
edge I mean this wasn't a great night for shooting astro but we can see that there is very little amounts of coma
31:26
They're not kind of growing wings or looking like insects Just a tiny bit of stretching Overall however this is a
31:33
very nice lens for shooting the night sky So a lot of optical strengths and just a few weaknesses here So while this
31:40
isn't a flawless lens the fact that they have been able to take this focal length
31:45
and aperture combination and really miniaturaturize it so effectively while
31:51
not compromising on the optics I think is a very very interesting proposal here
31:56
And so hopefully the deep dive has helped you to appreciate whether or not this might or not be the lens for you As
32:02
always thanks for watching Have a great day and let the light in [Music]

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Schneider-KREUZNACH x LK Samyang 14-24mm F2.8 FE Review | Impressive!

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