Samyang 8mm F2.8 Fisheye lens for Fujifilm Xpro1


wonglp

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Just gotten the above lens from Artworkfoto for my Fujifilm Xpro1 to do a quick review. No affiliation to AWF, just a user review to share my thoughts of this FE lens. It actually just arrive our shores on Monday 6th Aug.

Xpro1 is Fujifilm's flagship foray into mirrorless camera, with no AA filter in the sensor, this means the image quality from this camera is as sharp as you can get.

This is a 3rd party manual lens and I believe a first for Fuji X mount.

Pls kindly note that this will not be a technical review, just a user review. Will try several genre of photography for this lens, mainly landscapes, portraits and street.

I have the m43 mount 7.5mm FE lens as well which I like it alot, after using this for good 8 months, I'm a Samyang fan for the price vs performance it delivers.

Here are some of the specs:

Specification f=8mm Mirrorless / F2.8 (FISH-EYE LENS)
Aperture Rang F2.8 ~ 22
Optical Construction 10Element in 8Groups (1 ASPHERICAL LENS)
Angle of View 180˚ (APS-C)
Minimum Focusing Distance 0.3mm(1.0ft)
Filter Size NONE
Length 48.3mm ~ 55.8mm
Maximum Diameter Φ60.0mm
Weight 208 ~ 217g (this is so new that the actual weight is not updated on the website, the weight given was for Sony Nex & Samsung NX, I doubt there's a big difference to this)
Lens Coating Multi-coating

The website
 

Thanks Ed & Mike for the like:)

Here are some initial thoughts.

Looks & Built

Here's some shots taken just now.

From front. It looks really handsome.


From sides. The red ring on lens really matches my red thread leather case! :lovegrin: However it also renders my case bundled lens cap useless as it's uses a deep cap that covers the whole lens. Though the chrome part kinda sticks out quite prominently. Looks is always subjective so I leave to the readers to decide if it's nice.


It has a metal mount, which is great. And as it's manual focus lens, the focus ring feels well dampened and easy to manual focus. It has distance markers which is great, however no DOF marker, some may frown, I feel it's ok
as there's plenty DOF with this lens, and further help that it's on a cropped APSC sensor. One observation I have though is there is 0.7m 1m & 2m (shown below) markers before infinity & this is good, whereas on my m43 7.5mm version, it's only 0.25m before infinity & maybe little more tricky if need closer focusing are hyperfocal shooting.



Even at F2.8, the hyperfocal distance is 1.14m. At F8. it gets down to 0.408m. So it's rather difficult to get subjects out of focus especially stopped down.
 

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Looks, built and handling...cont'd

Its rather amazing to see an APSC sized lens that's made this small, even so compared to m43 fisheye (which has smaller sensor). Further, X mount FE lens is F2.8 vs m43 F3.5. The weight difference is also not that significant.

Left=X mount , Right = m43.



There's a love and hate affair with this lens cap. Whilst it's innovative to have a spring catch that will lock the petal hood in place, however, you will need to align it properly, once in place, it never drops unlike some other caps. One thing that really irks me is paint loss on my chrome m43 FE as the surface wear and friction will cause this to happen and fast pulling. Imo, not a good design. If they add some protection in the cap like a suede material will definitely prevent paint loss. Users should take care of not pulling out the lens without depressing the two spring catch. So do handle with care.



The multi coating of the lens is apparent.
 

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Lens design



The use of APSH (aspherical) and ED (extra-low dispersion) elements incorporated means the size can be smaller, sharper at the edges, chroma aberrations can be reduced, I will explore that more later.
 

Before we go further into more real field shots, there's another user review being done as well done by DemonicAnglez on fujifilm subforum here. Do feel free to swing by there as well, it always good to have different user experience to give a wider perspective.

On my shots, most of it I try to use it at F8 and increase my ISO as necessary as there are few times I was without tripod. Why so? Coz there's no electrical contact and it's difficult to record down every single shot aperture. Do remember 2 things when shooting with this lens:
1. Shoot without lens ON, otherwise, you will wonder why nothing happen when you press the shutter
2. Mount adapter setting and change it to 8mm. What it does is it records the 8mm into the exif file. Brilliant idea Fuji! Save a whole lot of trying to remember what lens you put on especially if one has several manual lens of different focal lengths.

And all shots are with Velvia mode (unless stated otherwise), why so again? Coz I like the Fuji velvia (vivid) colors very much especially for landscape :thumbsup::heart::)
 

Some test shots. One of the things that I was very wary is the use of ultra wide angles (UWA) on mirrorless cameras. There's a possibility of having color cast at the corners of the sensor. I had seen good results from m43, and Ricoh GXR + A12 M mount (which has microlenses at the corners) which was key to remove such color cast. Nex 7 whilst has a brilliant sensor, did not do that well in this aspect, so is Samsung latest NX20 mirrorless, which I tested couple of weeks back. While "Cornerfix" software can correct it, personally for me, I am lazy to do it if every shot has color cast.

So how did Fuji Xpro1 fair? Brilliant so far I would say, no corner color cast.

Here's a few test shots, chroma aberration looks ok as well. I think most are F8, can't really remember as was too eager doing test shots:) No tripod, all handheld.

F8? ISO800, 1/240s.


F8? ISO 800. 1/480s.


F8? ISO 800, 1/70s. Previous time I came here with my rectilinear UWA of 14mm equivalent of 135 format, wasn't able to capture whole scene without stitching. However this lens is able to. It's 12mm equivalent.


Shall continue tomorrow night as office has no flickr access. Thanks for viewing so far. Stay tune for more.
 

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One little "problem" with this lens is that it's too wide...often my hand/finger can get caught in the picture unknowingly, only after the reviewing then I realize. So can be rather irritating, so do take note. If possible just shoot with one hand. There are many users who gripe about the Xpro-1 sluggish AF of the native lenses, but with this FE lens and the deep DOF, it's easy to set it to hyperfocal or even infinity and it will be sharp especially for landscapes. So literally one can go shooting like a point and shoot and with one hand like a tourist, plus it's uber wideness, it can capture alot without one knowing.

Following shot, I was standing around 1.5m from the stairs, pointing the lens straight in front, the gentleman on the right had no idea he was on the frame. That's how wide it is with this lens

F8? ISO 800, 1/27s.


F8? ISO1250, 1/30s.
Doorway



The following shots was done in Taman Jurong a very old 1 room 1 hall type of HDB. Shot while having coffee, this place is near my office.

F8, ISO200, 1/240s. Tweak levels, shadows & highlights. No sharpening.


F8, ISO200, 1/340s. Tweak levels, shadows & highlights. No sharpening. Hmm, got a small sensor dust!:what:
 

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Had a walk at chinese garden 2 days ago, was a fine evening.

F8, ISO200, 1/200s. Straighten, and cropped a little.


A 100% cropped of the middle chinese characters
 

I find the pictures a little soft as compared to the 7.5mm m43 version which I usually put to infinity and walk around shooting and the sharpness corner to corner is good. Shot is at F8.



The right corner, very disappointing. I should have used hyperfocusing instead. I will do show some more tests to show hyperfocusing to get better sharpness, it might have been a problem with my copy on infinity focus as well. The later post on sharpness test is revisited using 1m focusing distance.

 

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Will share some shots in Chinese garden to show the potential of the lens for such landscapes. And then I will go into sharpness test. All shot at F8 unless stated otherwise. All OOC jpeg in velvia mode.



At F2.8 and minimum focus distance of 0.3m. Focus on red lantern.


 

Lens Flare

In this shot, the sun was at an angle to the lens, this was the worse I got in terms of flare (on the right), no other situation was I able to replicate. Very good performance I would say for such a wide lens.



This shot almost direct, no flare detected.

 

A few more from that day.

F8, ISO200, 1/340s, -2/3EV. Tweak highlights, shadows, levels. Except sharpness


F8. ISO200, 1/200s, 0EV. Tweak highlights, shadows, levels etc. Except sharpness


F8. ISO200, 1/320s, 0EV. Tweak highlights, shadows, levels etc. Except sharpness
 

Sharpness Test

Next few post will be dedicated to sharpness test. This is the original scenery, at the sweet spot of this lens. Tripod is used, and 2sec timer as well.



I had to revisit the problem I had with infinity focusing which works well for me with m43 version of Samyang lens. Here's a shot at F2.8 of the centre with infinity focus and around 1m focusing. The hyperfocal distance for APSC is about 1.1m with this lens.

Left is at infinity focus ,right is ard 1m focus.


It's clear that at 1m focus, instead of infinity focus, it's much sharper. I used 1m focusing for the next post for sharpness test at different aperture settings.
 

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Sharpness Test

Following sharpness test is based on 1m focusing for all apertures for simplicity instead of infinity. All 100% centre crop

F2.8, 100% Crop Centre


F4


F5.6


F8


F11


It looks like F5.6 and F8 is pretty close, F5.6 has a slightly better details for me. It's the sweet spot for me.
 

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Sharpness test, cont'd

F16


F22


Soft images at these apertures, diffraction could be a cause as well.
 

Corner sharpness at F5.6 & F8

F5.6


F8


As compared to a corner test done in chinese garden post #10, the performance here is much better, the reason is after switching from infinity focus to 1m focusing. I would say excellent details from this lens. It seems flickr has some details loss here, though I see a slight edge to F5.6 on my imac.
 

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I attempted some portrait shoot for my kids, it will give distortions so use it for fun rather than serious stuff :)

F8, ISO200, +0.3EV, 1/80s.


F2.8, ISO200, +0.3EV, 1/420s. Little blur background. Minimum focus distance, 0.3m


F2.8, ISO200, -0.3EV, 1/480s. Little blur background. Minimum focus distance, 0.3m
 

Just some conclusion after using this lens for 5 days.


Pros:

- Small & light
- Well built with good dampening manual focusing.
- F2.8 for lowlight handheld shots, with Fuji hi iso capabilities, it's great
- Plenty sharp even at corners, just need stop to F5.6 as sweet spot for this lens, F8 is also as good.
- Chroma aberration well controlled. So is flare resistance, only extreme cases.
- Nice star burst achievable at F8 ans smaller.
- Can be rather rectilinear, though this can be a con too.

Cons:
- At infinity focus not so sharp, but use it at hyperfocal it's great. Could be my copy.
- At first I would think lack of DOF scale may not be required, but since infinity focus not so sharp, perhaps this would be useful.
- Hate the caps design. See my earlier post.

Will be posting more images in the meantime. Hope the short review is helpful to some, if those had similar lens feel free to add to my findings.

Cheers

LP :)
 

A few more to share taken past few days, all at F8, velvia mode and, focus at 0.7m.







 

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