The 85mm, also known as the king of lenses, is on every photographer’s purchase list. Very often, the branded ones are expensive, and here comes the Samyang AF 85mm F1.4 FE for Sony E Mount, and we bring the review to you.
Let’s face it, many photographers who buy a lens of this focal length are portrait shooters. Samyang has made this lens for E Mount users to have another option to look at if they are not ready to fork out close to RM7,800 for the Sony G Master version. So, let’s have a closer look at this lens.
Built
The packaging box itself looks pretty innocent and normal, but once you have unpacked it, the shiny lens will make the aperture of your eyes opens up wide. The external build is solid. It comes with a pouch, lens hood and caps for both ends of the lens. There are no other buttons or switch visible on the lens body, such as the AF/MF switch, just a focusing ring for manual focus. This also means this lens does not come with an in-built image stabiliser, and this explains the weight of the lens, which is pretty light and compact. It weights at 568gram, one of the lightest in its class.
To stabiliser the images at this focal length are tricky sometimes, thus, it has to rely on the IBIS in the Sony Alpha bodies to compensate for the lack of this feature. This also explains why the lens is not as costly as the original Sony ones, but the Sony ones do not have image stabiliser function either, just a host of other extra buttons. Its internal glasses was constructed with 11 elements in 8 groups and one of them is a special ED lens.
For the outdoor photographer, the good news is, this lens is a weather sealing lens, light rain or dust could do no damage to your lens, so you can shoot with confidence in these conditions. Recent A7 bodies and A9 are moist and dustproof, so pairing with them for extreme outdoor shooting will not dampen your mood.
Handling
As we are testing this lens with the A7R III, we would say the pairing was marvellous, handsome and neat. Although we prefer to mount it to the A7R IV with a larger grip for the best comfort, the A7R III is generally comfortable too. We want to say it again, the proportion of these two pairings is neat and nice. Not too heavy, compact and easy to carry around. Even the model we hire for test shoot finds it easy to handle. With this lightweight lens, we can use it longer and steadier over a
Performance
Lens performance pretty much depends on two factors, the camera body and the lens itself. For our test, we use the high-r
Performance – Focus: In this test, we are making portraits shoot. The general rules of thumb, the eyes must be always in focus. The AF 85mm F1.4 FE has no problem utilising Sony’s famous Eye AF. In our test, we are using burst shot and make the focusing on AF-C mode to let the camera and lens to keep track of the model’s face and eyes. We are pretty impressed with the focus accuracy, and we would say it hits the spot almost every shot.
Performance – Speed: Now the focus can bite the subject’s eyes well, so what about the focusing speed? A few months earlier, we have tested Sony’s version, which was quiet and fast, and for this Samyang version, it is fast too, although we feel not as fast as the original brand made, it is still very fast, we think we can live with it. Fast enough for us not to make an issue out of it. One thing to take note though is the soft focusing gear sound, it is there and you will notice it – not annoying as it is soft and mild. For still photos shoot, this will not be a problem, and if you want to make some videos with this lens, you may need to work around it.
Image Quality
The real soft performance is the image quality that comes out from this lens. We are testing this lens with an outdoor shoot. Naturally, we set the aperture straight at F1.4, the biggest aperture to shoot portraits – with headshots, half-length and full-length and anticipate high hopes of getting great images. So, will the result from the shots disappoint us? Let’s look at the samples with no edit.
Headshots – It is sharp, very sharp, thanks to the Eye AF, the depth of field is shallow but not as extreme like some F1.2 models from other brands, at F1.4 the background could be “erased”, virtually, it turns the background into something unrecognisable but a piece of
Half-Length – At this point, the F1.4 still give a pretty shallow depth of field but you will get more details from the picture. This is the part the dreamy bokeh kicks in, the subject sharpness is still retained with good contrast while the overall picture presentation gives you a pleasant visual feel.
Full-Length – We don’t know about you, but personally, we like this lens more when shooting a full-length model. Apart from retaining the sharp overall focus on the subject and the balanced contrast, the bokeh in the background was magical. We don’t see any visible chromatic aberration nor vignetting effects.
In conclusion, this lens do have many great advantages, the best one we love best will be the price/performance ratio. We do hope Samyang could improve the focusing noise in the next updates.
PRO & CONS
Turn Ons
Price
Sharpness
Outstanding contrast
Turn Offs
Focusing sound
No MF/AF switch
No Image Stabiliser
Where to buy
Distributed by DSC World Sdn Bhd and at some local dealers, you can get a good price at RM2,888