Quick review of Samyang FE mount 135mm f/2 lens

I had the above lens in Nikon mount and was really impressed with it on my D800, but when adapted to the Sony A7r4 it developed a weird central flare when stopped down.

I recently came across a minty used example in EF mount at my (fairly) local camera shop, and after a quick shooting check at the shop door, sprung for it.

Gone is the weird flare. The lens is optically near perfect, resolving to the 130 lppmm limit of the A7r4 wide open at f/2. The bokeh is nice and smooth IMO, with the only imperfection being a slight cyan-magenta LoCa fringing on high-contrast OOF edges. Stopped down to f/2.8, this largely goes away, the contrast improves marginally and the slight vignetting brightens out.

The main downside, of course is the lack of AF, or any other automation. But if you're OK with this you'll be hard pushed to find a better 135mm f/2 lens at this budget price-point. Or at a much higher price for that matter.

I'll post some example pics when time allows.

I am curious Joe, what motifs do you find the 135mm useful for?

It was an extremely popular focal length back in the days, but seemingly went out of favour.

For portraiture, I have never grown up to like lenses longer than 85-105, and still I often find myself in situations where I wish they were a little wider, maybe around 70-75mm.

I am curious Joe, what motifs do you find the 135mm useful for?

It was an extremely popular focal length back in the days, but seemingly went out of favour.

Indeed. The 135mm focal length became widely despised as 'the amateur's first telephoto'. This attitude rubbed off on me for a while until I decided to rethink it. Using an old Nikon Series E 75-150mm f/3.5 probably prompted the rethink. I found the series E almost ideal for shooting intimate, small venue music/comedy performances at close to its maximum focal length. Its only drawback being the f/3.5 aperture.

The 135mm also offers a much thinner depth-of-field for a given aperture than an 85 or 105, and an f/2 135mm especially so. A prime is also a lot smoother in OOF rendering than most zooms at the same focal length. And at close distances you'll probably find most so-called 80-200mm f/2.8 zooms have actually shrunk close to a true 135mm focal length anyway.

I also have a Samyang f/1.4 85mm which gives about the same shallow depth of field. However its IQ wide open is nowhere near as good as this 135mm. So if you're using the wide aperture for subject isolation, rather than just light-gathering, then the 135mm gives better IQ and less LoCa - always provided you can increase the subject distance.

So I'm looking forward to giving it a good workout on the Sony, where the camera's huge pixel count coupled with the lens's amazing IQ will allow a lot of cropping flexibility to effectively give me a digital zoom as well.

Oh, BTW, this Samyang 135mm also focuses really close as well - about 0.8m - meaning you can almost fill the frame with a cigarette packet sized subject.

A bit late, but here are a couple of sample pix.

Taken @ f/2, focused on the bear's eye.

Another crop from an in focus area.

I shifted the focus to the bottle here to give a better idea of the OOF quality.

And a crop from the bottle label showing the tiny amount of magenta-green LoCa present at f/2.

It's only noticeable on high contrast detail like this.

Looks like an excellent lens.

I sometimes wish I could find more use for short/medium tele lenses - there seems to be many bargains out there.