Samyang AF 35 mm f/1.4 P FE
6. Distortion and field of view
Field of view
A rectilinear 35 mm lens on a full frame sensor should provide you an angle of view of 63.4 deg and the producers in their official specifications state this value exactly. Of course we decided to check how big this field really is. In order to do so we took photos of starry sky and saved them as uncorrected JPEG files.Then we transformed the pixel layout (X,Y) from the photo into the equatorial coordinate system (right ascension and declination), which locates a star on a celestial sphere. That way we could determine the field of view of the lens with utter precision and in the right way, so for rays of light coming from infinity. The transformation was based on the locations of 170 stars spread evenly across the frame and the average mesh-fitting error amounted to 50 seconds of arc.
Finally we got a result of 63.66 deg with measuring error amounting to 0.03 deg. The real field of view of the tested lens is a tad wider than the declared one but the difference is really slight. At the same time you have to remember that, in order to correct distortion, you have to crop images a bit so it is important that the field, provided by the Samyang, is wider than in official specifications, not narrower. To be honest, taking into account the results of distortion we are going to present in a moment, this amount of spare field of view should have been even a tad bigger.
Distortion
The Samyang AF 35 mm f/1.4 P is not one of these lenses where the producers decided to give up on distortion correction completely. At the sime a good performance in this category wasn't on top of the priority list. As a result on the smaller APS-C/DX sensor you have to deal with slightl barrel variant of distortion, amounting to -1.7% and it increases to a noticeable level of -2.67% after passing to full frame.
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| Sony A7R IIIa, 35 mm, APS-C | |||
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| Sony A7R IIIa, 35 mm, FF | |||
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It's also worth your while to compare these results to the results of the predecessor and direct rivals of the tested lens. What's interesting, the older Samyang corrected deformations even a tad better. The Sony remains here a real role model, showing that, if you want to, in this class you can reduce distortion to practically zero. The Nikkor shows something entirely different – its constructors pinned the distortion correction on software of the camera and forgot about the problem.
| |
Samyang AF 1.4/35 P |
Samyang AF 1.4/35 |
Nikkor Z 1.4/35 |
Sony FE 1.4/35 GM |
| APS-C/DX |
−1.47% |
−1.04% |
−2.30% |
−0.11% |
| FF |
−2.67% |
−2.01% |
−5.31% |
+0.73% |
