Samyang AF 12mm F2.0 Autofocus Lens for Sony E

Product Information

When hiking outdoors, I still prefer to use my Sony 10-18mm, as I almost never feel limited by it’s range of f/4. Still, the Rokinon 12mm has proven to be a very serviceable hiking lens, too. I’ve used the Rokinon on a number of hiking outings and the results are on par with my Sony 10-18mm. Shade And Sunlight San Gabriels View From Mt. Wilson Sierra Madre A thin rubber seal does give this lens some weather/dust sealing which is a nice upgrade from other inexpensive APS-C lenses I’ve used.

Samyang (Rokinon) 12mm f2 review on Sony a6000 - The Weekend Samyang (Rokinon) 12mm f2 review on Sony a6000 - The Weekend

The build quality of this lens is excellent. It feels very solid, despite weighing only 245g. The lens mount is metal and the lens is also compact for a lens with a bright f/2 maximum aperture. This makes the lens a perfect companion for more compact Micro Four Thirds bodies and it balances well with the P anasonic Lumix GX7 used for testing. The Rokinon 12mm is a crop sensor lens made for APS-C sensor cameras giving it an effective focal range of what would be 18mm on a full frame sensor. The aperture range goes from f/2 to f/22. The fixed 12mm lens has a minimum focusing distance of 7.9 inches. The glass uses a Nano Coating System (NCS) to improve the transmission of light, reduce lens flares and ghosting, and provide more contrast. This lens takes a 67mm filter. The Rokinon 12mm is built like a little tank using a combination of metal and plastic. Coming in at 8.64oz (245g), this lens is not the lightest, but it handles very well. 67mm Filter Vignetting is the light falloff, or dark corners, found in an image. The vignetting on the Rokinon 12mm is strongest at f/2.0, but falls off considerable as I approach f/8. You can look at the corners at some of the photos in this review to see the vignetting on the 12mm. Most of the time when I’m shooting at f/2.0 I’m composing a shot in low light so the dark corners are hardly noticeable. This is another exposure issue that is very easy to correct for in post processing. Distortion For still images, keeping a distance equal to the diagonal length of the full image surface is recommended. The full frame sensor of a digital camera is 36 x 24mm and the diagonal length is 43.26mm so any distance close to this number is nearer to the ideal than the currently accepted industry standard of 50mm.The lens has so far only been announced in a version for Sony cameras. An uncoupled mount is easily interchangeable, but that doesn’t apply to the algorithms for the autofocus. The addition of autofocus makes this lens highly versatile. The mechanical version was already very good for landscape photography and astrophotography. The latter is due to the high brightness, which in astrophotography means the shutter speeds can remain short and the sensitivity of the camera low. I’ve also been using the Sony 16mm prime lately. It’s super soft and not good for high quality prints, but very serviceable for ‘web use only’ photos on my hiking trip reports. The lens is small and light, weighing in at just 213g without caps or hood. It seems well made using high-quality plastics and has a solidly made metal lens mount of high precision. It fits onto the camera body smoothly. The lens is quite fat though compared to the A5100 body and this results in two handling quirks. The first is that the lens/camera does not sit flat on a flat surface and is not stable. It wobbles about, making use of say a tabletop as a lens support impractical. The second is that the lens can foul the tripod and really a spacer might be needed in some cases, or the camera may need to be mounted quite far forwards on the tripod platform. This shouldn't be an issue with larger APS-C cameras, such as the Sony A6000 series.

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This new prime lens is the world's first Autofocus 12mm lens compatible with E mount, which performs optimally on Sony APS-C mirrorless cameras. Note that the Rokinon 12mm f/2.0 can also be found listed as the Samyang 12mm f/2.0. There is no difference with these two lenses as they are exactly the same and differ in name only. ** MPB puts photo and video kit into more hands, more sustainably. Every month, visual storytellers sell more than 20,000 cameras and lenses to MPB. Choose used and get affordable access to kit that doesn’t cost the earth. In 2014, Samyang released a very similar lens to this 12mm f/2 AF but with a manual focus design (we reviewed it here). Despite being manual focus, the lens was very popular. Now, the new and improved version comes with autofocus and has improved image quality. if you could cram all that computing power into the size of a camera without heat penalties, I rather have my PC the size of the camera" => That's precisely what Steve Jobs has achieved 15 yrs ago with the iPhone/iPod...Lab-test results for ultra-wide-angle lenses never tell the whole story, as the physical size of the test charts requires that images are shot from very close range. In our real-world tests, we found sharpness to be excellent in the central region of the frame even when shooting wide-open at f/2, and edge/corner-sharpness to be generally very good, rising to highly impressive levels at apertures between f/2.8 and f/8. For me this lens is more interesting on APS-C like Sony or Fuji as it gives an ultra wide fov (18mm equivalent in ff/35mm film terms) whereas the 24mm fov is a more common wide angle and a few m43 zoom lenses offer this already. I love how well balanced this lens feels on the Sony a6000 series of cameras. At around 2/3 the weight of the Sony a6000, it’s very lightweight and feels good while shooting handheld. Optical construction is 12 elements in 10 groups, including 1 Hybrid Aspherical, 1 aspherical and 3 ED (Extra Low Dispersion). The diaphragm comprises 7 blades. Flare resistance is enhanced by the use of Samyang's well-proven UMC multi-layer coating techniques. Tip. If the moving distance is long, the camera may shake, so please shoot at a focal length between 35 and 100mm.