Opticallimits

Hi guys the Samyang 14mm F2.8 ED AS UMC turned up and WOW what great lens it is, great build quality, solid smooth focusing, plenty of metal and fairly compact. Full communication for aperture and focal length in the Nikon mount..

 Sharpness? Straight out of the box and on the camera focus to infinity and......horrible, soft center and....arrrgh  the edges!

 But we know that Samyang hardly bother with infinity calibration, ( which seems strange they must get loads of returns).

 

First port of call, is it well centered? OMG it is!

  Infinity focus was 2.9 mts on the distance scale, I calibrated infinity fully open at one third from the frames edge instead of the center using LV, as there is a little field of curvature, this gives a compromise and the results are good sharpness across the frame into the corners. there's a little blooming around super high contrast areas like bright white boats against trees and bushes, frankly it's of little consequence, that's gone by F4 and every thing's tack sharp everywhere. Chromatic aberration i don't see it's auto removed. There is a tiny bit of flare with the sun in the frame. Distortion is it's biggest flaw...Bof!

 

 For 315 euros delivered it's "truly" a lens not to miss, especially in the Pentax and Nikon mount that carry the contacts.I love Samyang lenses.

 

 

 

Another birdie lens.....you've guessed it ; .....it goes cheap cheap cheap!  Five stars.

 

 PS. It's the period of the Perseids shooting stars, I'll give it shot tonight.

 

It is a bargain, yes.

I wonder how good the AF one for Sony E mount is going to be?

Call us back when you've some Perseid ready to share... 

All Perseid stuff is a matter of luck and I must say I haven't had so much so far, I have spend three all nighters, the K3 with astrotracer  and the shutter open for 1.5 minuets at a time in batches of five hours. for just a few minor streaks. Last night I just stuck my head out the hatch and a beautiful shooting star bright as bright came barreling in not far off.

 

Tonight I will be running the D750 and the "yang" with 15 second exposures and the K3 running probably 90 seconds with the Sigma 10-20mm F4/5.6.

 Looking forward to seeing what the Yang can do, it's all just down to luck on the night!

 

 

I wonder how good the AF one for Sony E mount is going to be?

 

I briefly checked Nikon's focus confirmation for MF lenses, the depth of field is so great it thinks nearly everything is in focus, so looking at the focus scale once calibrated is better.

 

 A small note though: For adjusting infinity focus, the precision needed is far greater than you wood think for such a wide angle lens, to get best sharpness across the frame,  that final last sniff, a millimeter on the barrel made a huge difference, I got no sense of hyper-focal distance! 

I found all that "everything is in focus on a wideangle" trope rather... removed from reality. Especially for astro I've been dabbling in that for some time now). How come a tiniest rotation of the focus ring on my 24mm lens throws everything out of (usable) focus - say, the stars? I ditch the AF for this, of course, and rely on maximum mangification in Live View - and still...

 

It's also very easy to get misfocused shots with the Sigma 14mm f/2.8 that I have - even though it's wider AND slower. If something isn't melted into boken balls altogether that doesn't mean it's sharp, let alone usably sharp.

 

BTW I may be watching the Perseids this night as well. Depends on what the weather is going to be like, of course - if it's fine I may rush outta town and down south to the village where a bunch of astronomers I known are camping.

Quote: 

 

BTW I may be watching the Perseids this night as well. Depends on what the weather is going to be like, of course - if it's fine I may rush outta town and down south to the village where a bunch of astronomers I known are camping.

Sounds good, here,the sky is clear and the sun has just set, I've been agonizing over where to go, whether to go on the bicycle up to Mont St. Loup, But the moon is up till 1.00 am, so I going to take the campervan to the aeromodel club where's it's flat ground and use both cameras, the longer the shutter is open the more chance you have.

 

Hope your sky is clear and you have a good one!

I decided to skip out since I'd have little chance of returning in time for a (scheduled) shoot in the morning. Oh well.

I spent a two and a half hours trying to catch a Perseid meteor, the background town lights didn't help, but I got a couple of very faint ones nothing worth posting though, but I managed to get a decent "moonset" shot. 

 

 The Pentax K3 with the clip on astro-tracer is a good bit of kit which enables shots up to 5 minutes, but I've found anything over a  60-90 seconds starts to produce trails as well as anything land based blurring to much.

 Also a meteor may last half a second and isn't often that bright  in the resulting image compared with a star that has an exposure of 90 seconds can look pretty feeble.I had the Sigma 10-20mm F4/5.6 set at 10mm F4, not really a suitable lens, pretty soft at that setting.

 15 seconds is the max for the D750, but it's noise is way lower and the Samyang produced the best results I've had by far, very good for astro. It should be coupled with a equatorial mount to get exposures suitable for meteor shooting. taking a 15 sec. exposure over and over again just to chance a shooting star is a wearing process for the photog and the camera!

 

  Iill try again some where further from the damned town lights! 

 

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Comets are boring. Always too fast to place a sensible wish...