Introduction

Ease of Use

Weighing in at 585 grams and measuring 9.77cm in length, the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE is a big lens given its focal length, and significantly larger and heavier than both the Sony FE 50mm F1/8 and the Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA. As seen in the photos below, it rather dwarves the full-frame Sony A7R II camera, especially with the lens hood attached.

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens mounted on a Sony A7R II

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens mounted on a Sony A7R II

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens mounted on a Sony A7R II

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens alongside a Sony A7R II

Build quality is excellent. The lens has a metal housing and a metal mount too. The optical elements are made of high-grade glass and aspherical lenses have been included to minimise aberration and unnecessary light dispersion. The focus ring is pleasingly wide and ridged for easier grip.

Side of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens

Front of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens

Rear of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens

Focusing is usefully internal and manual focusing is possible when set on the camera body. Full-time manual focus override is not available, and there's no distance and/or depth of field scale either.

Side of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens

Side of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE ships with a soft drawstring bag and a large plastic petal-shaped lens hood. It accepts 67mm filters.

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens in-hand

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens with the supplied hood fitted

Focal Range

At the 50mm focal length the angle of view is 46.8 degrees.

50mm

Focusing

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens has a wide focus ring. There are no hard stops at the ends of the range, making it more difficult to set focus at infinity. Polariser users should be pleased that the 67mm filter thread doesn't rotate on focus.

When it comes to auto-focusing, the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE is a fairly quick performer, taking about 0.25 seconds to lock onto the subject when mounted on the Sony A7R II that we tested it with.

We didn't experience too much "hunting", either in good or bad light, with the lens accurately focusing almost all of the time. It has quite a noisy focusing mechanism, though, which makes this lens less well-suited to video recording.

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as purple or blue fringes along contrasty edges, were quite prevalent in our test shots, as shown in the examples below.

Light Fall-off

With the lens set to its maximum aperture of f/1.4, there is significant light fall-off in the corners. Stopping-down to f/5.6 virtually eliminates this.

Light fall-off at 50mm

Macro

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE isn't claimed to be a macro lens, with a minimum focusing distance of 45cm/1.47ft and a magnification reproduction ratio of 0.15x. The following example demonstrates how close you can get to your subject, in this case a Compact Flash memory card.

Close-up performance

Bokeh

Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc. In the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE lens, Samyang employed an iris diaphragm with nine rounded blades, which has resulted in very nice bokeh in our view. We do realise, however, that bokeh evaluation is subjective, so we've included several 100% crops for your perusal.

Sharpness

In order to show you how sharp this lens is, we are providing 100% crops on the following page.