Samyang AF 35mm f/2.8 FE

I’ve written about purchasing the Samyang 45mm as my first full-frame Sony lens, and how much I like it. In 2021, knowing I’d be going to a leaving do and that it was one of my first large events since COVID first hit us, I purchased the wider, smaller and slower 35mm lens.

Mount	Sony E (full frame compatible)
Weight	86g
Purchased	30 August 2021
From	Amazon
Price	£219

I think I took a total of two photos, both very poor, at that event with the lens. I rather stupidly blamed the lens, not the person behind it, and put it on the shelf with a vague mental note to sell it. Thankfully the Lens Flair mission, requiring me to use every one of my lenses, made me use it, and I took it (and only this lens for the Sony A7RIII) on a four day trip to Porto.

This thing is tiny; 33mm long. Samyang (who confuse things by being called Rokinon in the USA) describe it as a “body cap lens”. I’m not sure about that, or what it really means, but it’s so small that it has a small contribution to total weight and can be put in a pocket to have just in case.

I wonder if part of the intent of this lens by Samyang was to be a bridge lens for APS-C camera owners who though they might (like me) move to full frame. This would be a 52.5mm equivalent lens when used on a APS-C body, which is pretty close to the classic 50mm, and the tiny size would fit well an A6000-series camera. This might make you worry about edge sharpness on full frame, and although it’s obviously not the best lens ever, it holds up pretty well. The bookshelf below is taken at f/4 and indoors (so the light isn’t great). It’s definitely sharper in the middle, but it’s not unusable at the edges.

The below, taken at f/5.6 shows really respectable corners and no obvious lack of detail anywhere in the frame. I have no concerns at all using this on a full-frame camera and a A7R-series one (the R bit of the name marks higher resolution sensors) at that.

I think the contrast is really strong on this. The images above all show solid separation between lights and darks and plenty of detail in between.

Something I wasn’t really thinking about (but is obvious when I think) is that this is good lens for fairly close portraits. I took a small Olympus zoom (I’ll review it soon) to Porto and I initially thought I’d need to use that to get a bit closer, but the following two work great and have relatively little cropping (and the quality of the lens holds up when I did crop):

Sometimes people say it feels unbalanced to have tiny lenses on full-frame full-sized cameras. I do understand this, especially when you’re zooming and so adjusting the lens, but I didn’t find this a problem with the Samyang 35mm. As a prime, you’re not zooming, and I barely used manual focus – when I did it was perfectly fine to turn the (slightly too loose) focus ring.

One odd element about the lens is that it comes with a “hood” which is a thin ring that reduces the filter size from 49mm to 40.5mm. I can’t say I had much problem with flare, but I wouldn’t use the hood either way. The 40.5mm cap is small and pings off too easily, and it doesn’t work for me. I’ve not used it since I got the lens, which meant I had to buy a cheap 49mm lens cap (see the feature image for this review to see how the lens normally looks to me). I had to dig out the original hood and lens cap for the sake of this review:

I found this a great travel lens. When recently purchasing a 28-75mm lens I read some views online that you’d miss the wide end (other lenses like this normally start at 24mm). While in Porto I was almost always happy with 35mm. There were a few small cases where I couldn’t step back any more to fit the view I wanted in, but I was pretty happy with the sacrifice given I had a tiny lens on a full-frame body.

It’s easy for me to recommend lenses that I already have, and of course this has some flaws – you do get some vignetting (easy to adjust in post, and I love a bit of vignetting), it feels relatively plasticy (but as I’ve said above not in a way that should bother you) and the hood is hopeless. But this is only £219 from Amazon right now for a full-frame lens that I really, really enjoyed using. It’s inspired me to put my not-full-frame Sony 35mm f/1.8 on my A6700, and I’ll obviously report back on the results (spoiler – I think it’s not as good). So get this if you have a full-frame Sony camera. Just lose the hood.