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Hi, I'm Dustin Abbott. The Nightwalker series from Sirai is basically the cine counterpart
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of their Sniper autofocusing series for stills for photography. Pretty much your standard
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prime trio. Now they are expanding the series with a little bit less conventional focal
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lengths including 16mm, which is what we're looking at today, which corresponds to about
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24mm on full frame, and then a 75mm, which we'll review in the future, that corresponds
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to about 113mm. Not necessarily a conventional focal length, but one that's useful for longer
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shots. All of these lenses share common design elements, a common maximum light transmission
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of T1.2 or so, a corresponding maximum aperture of F1.2, and they all cost roughly $340-350
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US dollars, though obviously as the series is on the market, sometimes you can get them
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a little bit cheaper than that. So the question is, are these worth buying, worth investing
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in as a series? Well today we're going to look specifically at the 16mm T1.2 Sirai Nightwalker
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lens and try to find that out together. Let's dive in. Now with any kind of cine lenses in a series, it's really important to have some common
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design elements, and so that you can actually hot swap those lenses without having to readjust
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focus follow systems, things like that. So as a byproduct, it's very important for them
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to have similar exterior dimensions, have similar ratio of distance between the rings
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for gearing, and then of course to make sure that those rings are similar in their diameter
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and so that they can be geared easily. That is obviously the case here, so they have uniform
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size, uniform gearing positions, and then also on the optical side of things, they're
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designed to have a consistent color tone throughout the now five lenses in the series
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Now these lenses all come in either a black finish, kind of standard, or this really great
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looking gunmetal gray, which I say go for the gunmetal gray. They look really fantastic
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have a beautiful finish on them, very nice design element, some of the nicer looking
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cine lenses actually that I have used at this point. So they all have a similar diameter
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of 79 millimeters, that's 2.1 inches, and right over 94 millimeters in length, or 3.8
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inches. Now in this case, weighing in at 592 grams or 1.3 pounds, so not particularly lightweight
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though obviously some cine lenses can get really heavy. And considering that these do
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have a maximum aperture of f1.2 or a T-stop of T1.2, these are reasonable for the build
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quality you're getting, and then also the brightness of the glass itself
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Now the rings here, as is incredibly important on lenses like this, they are beautifully
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damped, buttery smooth, very easy to use one finger to either do a aperture rack or to
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do a racking throughout the manual focus range. There are 270 degrees of focus rotation
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so really nice for a lot of focus pulls, though it's going to be a little bit long for those
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close to distant pulls where you've got to make a fuller rotation around. And so it works
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obviously best when you're working from more like medium to distant or short to medium
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rather than going all the way from short to distant pulls. Your closest focus distance
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here is 30 centimeters, so-so, and maximum magnification is going to be correspondingly
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so-so. Not amazing, but not bad for that. Now the aperture itself is clickless, as you
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would expect, and so it is easy to do nice aperture racking. And as you can see from
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these shots, obviously if you move a little bit slower, you get a little bit, it allows
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the camera to kind of keep up in terms of making an exposure compensation as you close
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down the aperture or open it back up. And so anyway, you have to, that's kind of a practiced
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art to get the best results out of that. We have 13 aperture blades, so that creates a
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very nicely circular aperture shape, as you can see here, but also when stopped down
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I think that the overall, the look of the sun stars are fairly nice there as well. 67
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millimeter front filter threads up front. There is no weather sealing on these lenses
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no electronics, which is pretty standard for Cine lenses. And so as the overall handling
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goes, they are nicely made, really beautiful lenses actually, and everything that I can
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see from the gearing feels very, very nice. Now, as far as some of the optics here, which
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I'm going to look at this purely from a Cine perspective, some less of my test charting
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because the truth of the matter is, is I will be covering the same optics in the Sniper
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series. So if you're interested in how they perform in a pure kind of optical sense, less
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for Cine work, you can check out those reviews. So one thing that I found very interesting
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I'm covering here in a Sony E-mount, and so because it's Sony E-mount, I have the option
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of switching between S35 and then the full frame coverage. I found that these lenses
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just about, for video at least, just about cover the full frame image circle with the
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16 millimeter. So you can see from the shot of a farmhouse that there is some shading
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in the corners, and obviously the corners are going to be softer because you're kind of getting to the very edges to where the lens is not purely engineered for those full
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frame corners, but for some shots, it's definitely going to work. And so you can see here compared
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to the Super 35 mode, so your typical crop, that it is considerably wider and you're getting
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some additional vignette, but not necessarily a true hard mechanical vignette that's going
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to look awful in your shot. You can see here as I move along a wall that distortion is
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nice and low, not really an issue there with any kind of major barrel distortion, so high
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points there. When it comes to the longitudinal chromatic aberrations, you can see here as
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I pull back and forth that there definitely is some fringing, also some spherical aberrations
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at f1.2 where contrast is a little bit lower in the shot. I did find in real world pulls
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that I didn't find fringing to actually be bad in most real world shots, but what I did
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feel is that there's just kind of an overall slight dreamy effect to images at f1.2, or
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t1.2. You can see that the contrast isn't amazing. It is sharp enough to work in most
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focus pulls, and so for example, going back to the farmhouse scene here, you can see that
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as I advance from the foreground, the foreground looks crisp enough, and then as I pull all
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the way to the farmhouse itself, it looks fairly good even at t1.2. The lens is fairly
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sharp when stopped down, though never like bitingly sharp, I wouldn't say. You can see
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in these shots from a marina area that everything looks reasonably sharp, but not so crisp that
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it kind of pops off the screen at you. These lenses, particularly the 16mm, is not what
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I would call particularly flare resistant. Now for some shots, as I shoot through these
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leaves for example, the flares don't look too bad. A bit of ghosting artifacts, but
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I think it mostly works. But when I panned across, you can see that kind of halo of the
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sun kind of effect, and then also just some generalized ghosting artifacts. When stopped
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down, you can definitely see a more defined ghosting pattern. And so, you know, your mileage
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may vary on what you're looking for, but if you're looking for something strongly flare resistant, I'm not sure that this is the lens for you. The bokeh is actually pretty
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nice for a lens like this. Of course, having the big maximum aperture certainly helps
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but I did find that there is some outlining with some bright specular highlights. It's
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a look, you know, bokeh is a subjective measurement, and so maybe you like that look, maybe you
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don't like the look, but I'll show you a few shots here just to give you a sense of how
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it performs. So my conclusion is that this is a great addition in terms of focal length
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going wider, having a wider lens is very, very useful, particularly if you're shooting
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maybe at AK, for example, unless you have some deep cropping ability to follow along
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If you're already invested in the Nightwalker series, obviously it is very valuable at that
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point to have additional focal lengths to choose from and to have an actual wide focal
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length to choose from. I also found that as an added bonus for many shots, it can double
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as a reasonable 16mm full frame lens. And so that does give you different framing or
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the ability to shoot a little bit wider and then crop in a little bit if you want to get
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rid of some of the edge stuff, but a considerably wider image than just a 24mm equivalent will
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provide in Super 35. Note for this, however, that the corners aren't going to be super
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sharp because the lens isn't really engineered for the full frame sensor. I give it very
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high marks for being very nicely made and highly functional mechanically. The price
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is also good, but I will say buy this lens if you don't mind that slightly dreamier look
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wide open. If you want bitingly sharp, high contrast images, then I think that there are
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other alternatives that might work better for you. But if you've liked some of the look
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of the footage that you've seen here, certainly this is a series that now has five attractive
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different focal links, reasonably priced. And if you are a filmmaker on a budget, the
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Nightwalker series from Sirai might work just fine for you. I'm Dustin Abbott. If you look
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in the description down below, you can find some buying links there if you want to explore
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this series further. As always, thanks for watching. Have a great day and let the light in
