Samyang AF 35mm F1.4 Autofocus Lens for Sony FE

Product Information

The shell is primarily engineered plastics, but it is built around a metal lens mount and feels solidly constructed. How happy are with this lens’s optical performance is likely to depend on how closely you tend to examine your images onscreen during processing.

We and our partners use data for Personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Although AF is useful for this, the focus distances are clearly marked on the top of the lens, and with a little practice it is easy to get close to the correct focus prior to checking the viewfinder or live view. Unlike most of Samyang’s mainstream manual-focus lenses, the XP range includes the necessary electronics for setting the aperture from the camera body, so you can shoot in the full range of PASM modes.It’s available in a huge array of mount options but only the F-mount version for Nikon DSLRs includes electronics, enabling full use of PASM shooting modes and the illumination of focus assist/confirmation lamps in the viewfinder. Color fringing is quite negligible throughout the whole aperture range, right out to the extreme edges and corners of the image frame. It is slightly longer than the format diagonal, which would actually be 43mm, so is showing us just about the same perspective as the human eye.

The selling point for these third-party optics, available for all contemporary camera systems, is that they're a good deal affordable than most other lenses, especially the manufacturers' own. Samyang was one of the first third-party makers to produce autofocus lenses for full-frame mirrorless cameras, with its initial E-mount examples appearing as far back as 2016.

However, the Canon EF and Nikon F mount versions with an ‘AE’ suffix have more to offer than the editions for other cameras. There are faster lenses, for sure, but I think most users will be happy with the Samyang, given that it’s unlikely to be employed for fast-moving sports or action.