SAMYANG

One of the most popular focal lengths for photography is 35mm due to its versatility.
I for one had fallen in love with the first Samyang AF 35mm F1.4 and now,
Samyang had finally released its second version, Samyang AF 35mm f1.4 FE II!

Well, many, as I've said, it is a versatile lens. First of all, we do video contents on YouTube and this lens is our main appointed videography lens next to Samyang AF 24mm f1.8. Its fast AF paired with our Sony A74's tracking capability is certainly a match made in heaven. We can use it outdoors to show more of our location as well as indoor talking head videos where it's perfect to just place it on a tripod behind our computer table. The weight poses no problem too because we were able to put it on our gimbal with ease.

Next, the main thing I use this lens for is portrait photography, most importantly, indoor painterly photos. Oh, my goodness, I could talk about this all day, I get all worked up when it comes to that! As I have mentioned, I fell in love with the first Samyang 35mm and it’s the very lens that I have discovered the beauty of using artificial light and very posy images. This has explored the corners of my inner creativity and is one of the joys that I have in Portrait photography.

Let's first compare it to the first one, although visually, they look similar apart from the newly added features such as the custom switch and focus hold button as well as the silver ring instead of the red ring, they aren't exactly the same internally.

From my user experience perspective, this lens has a much faster AF, I have used it on 3 Sony bodies, A7RIIIa, A7III, and A74. The chromatic aberration is very well controlled on this one especially when I'm shooting against bright light and I see that it produces a much better image quality.

Amongst all other 35mm available in the market, this is by far the best choice considering its price point and its capabilities. We have made a full review of this lens on our YouTube channel where we have tested it for outdoors, indoors and its autofocus which we have enjoyed so much. This is again, another lens I will be using quite a lot in the future.