Rokinon / Samyang?

[Clive McLaughlin]

Has anyone any experience of these?

I was curious and came acros this sample footage. Looks very nice.

Rokinon 35mm f/1.4 Lens Video Test - YouTube

Costs £400


Sigma 30mm f1.4 DC HSM - £499
Sigma 35mm f1.4 DG HSM - £700
Canon EF 35mm f1.4 L USM Lens - £1060
Zeiss 35mm f2 T* Distagon ZE - £900

[James Manford]

Not specifcally the 35mm.

But I have both the 14mm F2.8 and 85mm F1.4 samyang lenses ...

Terrific glass, crystal clear sharpness on the EA50. So I can only imagine this will be in the same league, if not better.

[Stevan Ostojic]

I have the 35mm, probably my most used lens, awesome lens, pretty sharp, love it.

[Victor Nguyen]

I have 14mm, 35mm, and 85mm. They are a perfect set for Apsc sensor. I use 14mm on Glidecam. 35mm as my normal and 85mm as my portrait. Now that I switch to full frame, the 85mm is one of my favorite lens to use for lock down shots of the first dance.

[Victor Nguyen]

Even though they are made of plastic, they still feel nice but not as nice as other manual focus lens like Contax Zeiss. They all have really nice focusing. The 35mm is one of my favorite lens to focus on. Except for the weight and size, the 35mm is perfect. The 85mm is small and compact but it has very short minimum focus (bummer). The 35mm on the other hand focus close enough for most situations.

[Clive McLaughlin]

Thanks folks.

Victor, is the 35mm suitable for a wedding ceremony? I worry that I won't be able to get in close enough with it on a full frame. Wish they had a 50mm.

I don't really want to buy two lenses.

[Victor Nguyen]

I sometimes use the 35mm as a wide for ceremony. It works better in reception because of how fast it is.

[James Strange]

I have the 24, 35 & 85. love them.

[Noa Put]

I"ll add to that, I have the 14, 24, 35 and 85mm and plan to get the 8mm soon :) I only wish they did some constant f2.8 and cheap zooms as well. The 24mm and the 85mm are my favorite lenses.

If you get such a lens make sure you get the cine version, only my 24mm is a cine version (I got the other ones before the cine versions where available) and it makes enough difference for me finetuning my exposure. All great lenses for their price, I would expect very expensive canon glass to produce a bit sharper images but for the big price difference and the small performance difference the samyangs are no-brainers.

[Clive McLaughlin]

Do you guys really change lenses so much during the day? I (partly due to lack of money) have only ever shot on a single 30mm lens (on crop sensor therefore 50mm).

I'm upgrading to full frame and really want the 35mm, but I feel like i'll be too wide for a lot of stuff, so I'll probably get the canon or most likely sigma 50mm.

If I had the money I'd probably get both 35 and 80 Samyangs. Part of me is glad not to have the hassle of switching lenses through the day.

[Noa Put]

Changing lenses is a pain but I use specific lenses for specific parts of the day, like the 85mm for talking heads at reception of when people sit at the tables in the venue, the 24mm is used to get some quick handheld shots from general action that's going on (and it's wide enough for most purposes) where I can push the background nicely out of focus and for some creative closeups, the 14 mm is always on a dslr which stays on the steadicam. The 35mm is not being used right now but might be soon as I am thinking of getting a vg30 body only as b cam for my nex-ea50. A 8mm lens would only be used for some creative shots and on the steadycam. My nex-ea50 stock lens gets used a lot as general purpose lens, as long as there is sufficient light.

[Bruce Phung]

I got Sigma 35 f/1.4, this lens stay on my 60D most of the time. Other than than that I use EF 50 f/1.4 and EF 85 f/1.8. All of these primes lens are so freaking sharp and I have not used my zoom lens Sigma 17-50 f2.8 OS

[Byron Jones]

I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that these two brands were the same company. If so, why does B&H sell both?

[James Manford]

Falcon, Rokinon, Samyang, Walimex are the same.

[Michael Kraus]

I keep the canon 50mm 1.4 almost the entire wedding day, every wedding. It's cheaper than the Rokinon 35. I'd wager the reason Rokinon doesn't have a 50mm is because the Canon 50mms are already such a great value and they can't really compete.