It’s nice to handle despite being manual focus and not having image stabilisation. thank you! Overall, the Samyang has been, and still is a great lens for me. Samyang 12mm f/2.0 NCS CS Handling and Features. Nice pictures. The Samyang 12mm (and all other Samyangs, AFAIK) has no electronic connection to the camera, so the camera doesn't know it's attached. Hi Cam. It’s just crazy wide, wider than anything else. It’s definitely a lens that gets mixed reactions. Well you get a neat, compact lens which looks very well put together and made with nice materials. -Roy, Hi thanks so much I think I’m willing to invest on this. Glad you found the article helpful! -Roy, Dear Roy, I enjoyed reading your blog on this lens. Glad you’re enjoying the Samyang! Are ypu happy with the overall build quality of this Lens? Nice review and photos. The Samyang 12mm F/2.0 NCS CS is a high-performance, extra-wide-angle manual-focus lens, specifically designed for APS-C … I set the camera to the normal full screen display (ie not the twin screen mode) and then a touch of the focus assist button magnifies the centre portion of the screen allowing me to see the focus peaked edges really clearly. With regards to the sharpness and focus settings, it’s really just that. I stumbled upon your blog when I was researching on cheap vintage lenses for my fujifilm. Obviously the fixed focal length makes it a bit less versatile than the zoom, but the max aperture of f/2 is a real bonus, especially since one of the reasons I wanted to get a super wide angle is for interior shots, so the extra couple of stops would come in very handy. To see this page as it is meant to appear, please enable your Javascript! The Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 with and without the included lens hood The lens is rather small for an ultra-wide-angle, especially so when considering the f/2.0 maximum aperture. Hi Nicole! Manual lens, Samyang 12mm @f2.0. This lens takes a 67mm filter. You can visit my website. The fixed 12mm lens has a minimum focusing distance of 7.9 inches. The Rokinon 12mm f/2 NCS CS wide angle lens is indeed one of the best examples of a great thing that comes in a small package.. It’s downright tiny, and yet it offers many things that a very professional wide-angle lens should: sharpness, durability, and an impressively fast aperture. Regarding the infinity, it’s just trial and error really. Forget using a tripod, be mindful of where you put your feet, this lens sees all. It is super sharp even at f/2.0 with 98.9 degree angle and rectilinear image mapping function. On the Fuji X-T3, the 12mm focal length is … Thanks for reading and for your question! In order to use the lens you have to turn on the option to release the shutter without a lens (since the body can’t communicate with the lens it doesn’t know it’s fitted). It clicks firmly against the lens mount with no noticeable side to side play and only a slight amount of rotation play, no more than any of my other lenses. I’m sorry to hear about your Samyang that got stolen. Trustworthy images can be captured even under inferior environment. Another thing I like about this lens is that it doesnât make me worry when Iâm out traveling with it. With more expensive glass and bodies, you tend to worry a bit more about damaging the gear or it getting stolen. Iâm not advocating being careless about gear nor do I have money burning a hole in my pocket, but the Samyang is affordable enough that you wonât be too devastated if it gets damaged or stolen while traveling. Pair it with a cheaper body like the X-E1 and youâve got a pretty worry-free travel setup that makes high-quality images. If the worst does happen, it wonât be too hard to replace the kit. Iâd be more worried about losing the SD card of images. I just tried a shot on a Fuji X-E1 and anything further than a metre or so is sharp. I would love to hear from you on your settings for Landscapes to get the maximum zonal sharpness. The aperture and focus rings are made of plastic, but the former has the right amount of resistance and well-defined half-stop clicks, whereas the latter is smooth but not too easy to accidentally move. The images were imported into Lightroom and I applied the standard Samyang 12mm profile which is supplied by Adobe to correct for any distortion. If the magnification isn’t enough, the back control wheel allows the magnification to be changed and then a quick half-press of the shutter button resets the display to normal. A short hike in the mountains over Sion/Valais. But if you get to know how to use it and maximize it, it can really help make some great images. Because the lens is a manual focus lens, I tend to set the EVF and LCD display to show the film simulation image with a black & white film selected. It term of field of view and price it beats hands down the. Win a Samyang 12mm f/2.0 NCS CS Lens! Here's your guide to understanding the basics behind the Samyang lens line and its private label brand names. By aperture priority mode I mean of course set the shutter speed and ISO to auto, since the X-T1 doesn’t have ‘modes’. I believe I replied to you via email, but I’m going to quickly answer this here as well. I took some time to find the true infinity setting by trial and error. It is very compact at only 2.33″ long (59.1mm) with a diameter of 2.85 inches (72.5mm). To add an extra bit of sharpness, I also sharpen my RAW files in Lightroom (usually set to around 40) and sometimes add a bit of clarity. All the best! These are some crops I took from one of the pictures above to show the corner and centre performance of the lens. The Sony Zeiss 16-35 is on my Sony body most of the time. One unfortunate by-product of the ‘non-communication’ between the lens and the body is the fact that the really good X-T1 depth of field display, where a graph at the bottom of the image shows the focus point and depth of field, doesn’t work. I found that focusing the lens on the Fuji is easy when it’s necessary, but for most shots if the aperture is set to f/8 or f/11, which would be a normal setting on a reasonably bright day, the focus can be set a bit off infinity and ignored. Available for 5 camera mounts: Canon M, Sony E, MFT, Samsung NX, Fujifilm X . As I have seen in the forums and Facebook groups, the Samyang seems to be a stepping stone lens of sorts for a lot of people. People tend to buy the Samyang as an intermediate lens due to the low cost, then later sell it off when they can afford the Fuji 10-24 f/4 or something similar. Perhaps itâs the limitations of manual focus or maybe even the “unsexy” non-Fuji factor of the Samyang that drives this. However, I have personally never felt the urge to âmove onâ from this lens, especially when it produces such nice images. The images it produces are sexy enough for me. The Samyang 12mm F2.8 Fisheye is really an exciting lens , very sharp , low lens fall off, flare resistant, capable of offering perfectly usage rectilinear 180° field of view for less than 500 euros with the Fisheye-Hemi plug-in. Thank you for reading! Thanks for reading, Yoan! It feels very solid, despite weighing only 245g. See instructions. From then on I’ve been able to get sharp images with the lens. If the object being photographed is not in the centre of the screen, the focus point can be moved by pressing the down button on the 4 way controller and moving it, but I tend to move the camera to focus and then re-compose. However, for an ultra-wide angle lens with a super-fast f/2.0 aperture, it gets a heck of a lot right. Hi Mike! Your email address will not be published. I see some magic in the foreground. As ever, I use this lens on a full frame 5D Mark III. The Samyang 12mm f/2.0 NCS CS (also branded as Rokinon), as it’s officially called, was released around May or June of 2014. Samyang 12 f2 - Well worth the price Alright, this modern Korean lens is not vintage at all, but it is a manual focus lens, so it's somewhat in keeping with the purpose of this site. There is a somewhat similar lens to the Samyang, the Zeiss Touit 12mm f/2.8. I have never used this lens so I canât really say anything about it. But on paper, the only advantage that it seems to offer over the Samyang is autofocus. Reviews have stated that the Samyang is even sharper than the Zeiss, not to mention a stop faster and much cheaper. Optical construction of the lens comprises 12 elements divided into 10 groups, these components include one asherical lens (ASP) and one hybrid aspherical lens (H-ASP). At just 258g, this thing is pretty lightweight for a superwide f/2.0 lens, but it feels solid and has a metal mount, so it looks robust enough. Late last year I purchased a Samyang 12mm F2 NCS (manual focus) lens. It's exactly like using an adapted lens via a "dumb" adapter in this respect. Thank you for watching the video and for your kind words about my work! 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