Samyang AF 50mm F1.4 FE
Is Samyang’s first autofocus lens an obvious choice for budget-conscious Sony full-frame shooters? Andy Westlake finds out
an autofocus lens for budget-conscious sony full-frame shooters
Mirrorless systems have seen a huge rise in popularity over the past few years, with Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic and Sony all making excellent cameras and building up their lens ranges to cover most enthusiasts’ requirements. However, support from third-party lens makers has lagged behind. Sony’s groundbreaking Alpha 7 series of full-frame CSCs is now more than three years old, but there’s still no sign of matched lenses from the likes of Sigma and Tamron. And while Zeiss makes a fine set of E-mount primes, the prices are even steeper than Sony’s own. One company has, however, stepped up to the mark, and it’s the Korean lens maker Samyang. Over the past decade it’s built up an increasingly high reputation for its range of fixed-focal-length optics. But all of its offerings remained resolutely manual focus until the debut of its first autofocus lenses last year: the AF 50mm f/1.4 FE and the AF 14mm f/2.8 FE wideangle. Both are designed to be used on Sony’s full-frame E-mount cameras.
Unfortunately for Samyang, the 50mm has quickly found itself in a crowded market, due to Sony’s own efforts. During 2016, it launched in quick succession the budget FE 50mm f/1.8 (£280), the high- end Planar T* FE 50mm f/1.4 ZA (£1,450), and the close-focusing FE 50mm f/2.8 Macro (£500) to join the existing highly regarded Sonnar T* FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA (£750). With such an array of price points covered, does the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE have a niche of its own to occupy?
Features
Clearly, the Samyang’s most telling feature is its fast maximum aperture: at f/1.4 it gathers half a stop more light than Sony’s closest-priced alternatives, making it ideal for shooting indoors in low light, or for isolating your
subjects against a blurred background. Samyang has chosen to use an optical formula of 9 elements in 8 groups, with no fewer than three aspheric elements, which is highly unusual for a 50mm prime. In principle, this should minimise the loss in image quality at large apertures due to spherical aberration that was typical of older fast 50mm primes.
The aperture can be stopped down to a minimum of f/16, with the diaphragm utilising 9 curved blades to give near- circular highlights at large aperture settings. When it’s set to small values, 18-point star patterns become visible around bright light sources. The minimum focus distance is a resolutely conventional 45cm, and an internal focus design ensures that the 67mm filter thread doesn’t rotate during use. To minimise flare and ghosting, Samyang has applied its Ultra Multi Coating (UMC) treatment to the glass surfaces.
Build and handling
Measuring 74mm in diameter and 98mm long, the Samyang is pretty sizeable for a 50mm lens. But it’s still smaller than the benchmark designs in this class, Sony’s FE 50mm f/1.4 and the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art for full-frame DSLRs – particularly if you pair the latter with Sigma’s MC-11 mount converter for use on a Sony camera. Its 585g weight is also more manageable than either of these alternatives. Personally, I found it well-matched to the Alpha 7 II body, but if you see the main purpose of mirrorless systems as being about downsizing your kit, then Sony’s two f/1.8 offerings are both considerably smaller and less than half the weight.
In terms of barrel shape, Samyang has taken a similar approach to both Sony and Zeiss. A relatively narrow- diameter section immediately adjacent to the mount leaves space for your fingers to wrap around the camera’s handgrip, and forward of this the barrel flares outwards to house the bulk of the optical system. At the front there’s a mount for the deep petalshaped lens hood, which provides excellent protection to the front element and can be reversed over the barrel when it’s not in use.
While Samyang’s early offerings could feel a little crudely put together, its newer lenses have a more premium feel to them. This extends to the new 50mm, which certainly feels like a quality product. Metallic red and silver bands next to the smoothly rotating, finely ridged manual-focus ring add a touch of sophistication to the matte-black finish. However, photographers who mainly shoot outdoors should know that Samyang makes no claim for any form of weather sealing.
Autofocus
Given that this is one of Samyang’s first autofocus designs, the firm has done a very creditable job. Autofocus isn’t especially quick, mainly because the lens uses an unusually large ‘wobble’ to fine-tune correct focus, but for most purposes it’s perfectly adequate, and certainly not as frustratingly slow as Sony’s budget FE 50mm f/1.8. While the focus motor isn’t entirely silent, its high-pitched whirring is unlikely to be intrusive in anything other than a completely silent room. During my real-world shooting I saw few problems with focus accuracy or consistency, particularly when the subject was placed towards the centre of the frame. Occasionally, though, I found the autofocus could become unreliable with off- centre subjects, especially at shorter subject distances.
This occurs because the lens’s angle of view gets narrower as it focuses closer, which means that subjects placed towards the corner of the frame can move substantially relative to the AF- detection area during the focusing process. This confuses the camera, particularly when faced with a difficult situation such as a small subject against a complex background.
On those occasions where the autofocus doesn’t deliver, manual focus can be used instead. As with practically all AF lenses for mirrorless cameras, Samyang has employed a focus-by-wire, electronically coupled design, but it works very well indeed, allowing extremely precise focusing. Turning the focus ring brings up a magnified view when MF Assist is enabled in the camera’s menu, and this gives the most accurate results. Alternatively, you can use the camera’s focus-peaking display, but as usual this isn’t quite as accurate, and not really up to the task of getting your subjects critically sharp at large apertures.
Image quality
While we’d fully expect a £500 fast prime to deliver excellent image quality, it would be naïve to hope that this Samyang might equal Sony’s superb FE 50mm f/1.4, which is three times the price. In practice, the AF 50mm f/1.4 FE is indeed unable to rival the Sony’s biting sharpness, but the images it produces are highly detailed and have a very attractive character to them nonetheless.
In fact, this is a lens that gives much nicer images than technical tests might suggest. It excels in giving sharply defined subjects against dreamily smooth backgrounds – a threedimensional look that can only be delivered by fast lenses. At large apertures it can resolve a lot of detail, but at rather low contrast; stop down to f/5.6 and it delivers bitingly sharp images from corner to corner. Crucially, the background blur remains attractive at all apertures, which isn’t always the case.
Unlike the highly corrected Sony 50mm f/1.4, the Samyang shows visible distortion. Its behaviour is distinctly unusual: at long focus distances the distortion is of the barrel type, but for close- ups it transforms into pincushion. This complicates software correction, with Adobe’s profile being optimised for longer distances. Impressively, though, the in- camera distortion correction keeps track of things pretty much perfectly, meaning you’ll see properly straight lines when shooting JPEGs.
Vignetting is rather strong at larger apertures, but it can easily be removed when desired. I saw barely any colour fringing in the corners of the frame due to lateral chromatic aberration, but longitudinal chromatic aberration is a different matter. Pronounced green and magenta fringing can be visible around out- of-focus elements of the image at large apertures, especially at close focus distances. This is relatively difficult to remove, but can be suppressed using the defringe tool in Photoshop and Lightroom.