LensTip.com

Lens review

Samyang 50 mm f/1.4 AS UMC

3 December 2014
Arkadiusz Olech

11. Summary

Pros:
  • very good image quality in the frame centre,
  • sensibly corrected chromatic aberration,
  • slight coma in the corners of the APS-C/DX,
  • low astigmatism.

Cons:

  • image quality near the maximum relative aperture could have been better,
  • too high distortion,
  • unacceptable performance against bright light,
  • noticeable vignetting.

Although the comparison between the number of pros and cons of the tested lens seems to be hardly favourable you still cannot call it a botched device, quite the opposite. Even though it costs only a bit more than brand name models with autofocus, in many categories it fared better than them. What’s more it shouldn’t be ashamed by its performance in any of our test’s optical category, often outperforming such more expensive manual devices as the Voigtlander 1.4/50 or the Zeiss Planar 1.4/50.


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Of course it is noticeably worse than the new 50 mm lenses such as the Zeiss Otus or the Sigma A 1.4/50 but still you should remember that it is also much cheaper. To sum up we find the Samyang an interesting bridge between the old and new 50 mm instruments.