Samyang AF 24mm F 2 8 FE Review | 54 Data compared

The ePHOTOzine review highlights the Samyang AF 24mm f/2.8 FE as a compact "pancake" lens for Sony E-mount cameras, praising its excellent sharpness from center to edge across most apertures. Key performance highlights include fast, accurate autofocus, low chromatic aberration, and minimal distortion, making it an excellent choice for travel and street photography. While offering superb optical quality, the lens shows strong vignetting at f/2.8, suffers from some flare in backlit scenarios, and lacks physical distance/DOF scales. The review concludes it is a highly recommended "Editor's Choice" for its performance-to-price ratio.

The Samyang AF 24mm and 35mm f/2.8 FE prime lenses for Sony full-frame cameras offer exceptional portability and great value at a sub-$300 price point. Both pancake lenses are highly praised for being astonishingly small, lightweight, and constructed with a thin aluminum shell that provides a premium tactile experience. They feature an inner focusing mechanism that prevents dust accumulation, making them excellent choices for low-profile street, travel, and casual photography. While the 35mm version shines with impressive sharpness even when shot wide open at f/2.8, the 24mm version doubles as an effective, highly portable vlogging lens because its wider field of view tracks well in casual recording setups. Despite their overall solid utility, both lenses come with clear structural and optical trade-offs. On the downside, the 24mm variant suffers from noticeable softness when shot wide open at f/2.8, requiring users to stop down to f/5.6 or further to achieve acceptable sharpness. Furthermore, neither lens features weather-sealing, and their internal electronic mechanisms are composed of plastic. Video creators should also note that the autofocus motors generate an audible noise that can...

The Rokinon/Samyang AF 24mm f/2.8 FE is a compact, affordable, and flexible prime lens that performs well as an everyday option. The reviewer notes that while it is not a "star performer" designed to induce gear acquisition syndrome (GAS), it serves as an excellent 36mm full-frame equivalent lens when paired with an APS-C crop sensor camera like the Sony a6100. Key advantages of this lens include its quick autofocus capabilities, pleasing color reproduction, decent close-focusing abilities with nice background fall-off, and sufficient sharpness. Additionally, its highly flexible design allows it to be used as a true 24mm wide-angle lens on full-frame cameras like the Sony A7 series, all while maintaining a budget-friendly price tag of around $250 used or on sale. In contrast, the lens does have a few drawbacks, notably its lack of physical distinctiveness. It shares an almost identical size, weight, and zip case with its 35mm f/2.8 sibling, making them impossible to tell apart without checking the lens front, hood, or side text. The reviewer previously sold the lens due to its extreme focal length proximity to...

The WideScenes review highlights the Samyang AF 24mm f/2.8 FE as a highly compact, 93-gram, travel-friendly prime lens for Sony E-mount cameras, praised for its fast, quiet autofocus and excellent center sharpness at f/2.8. Conversely, the review notes significant compromises, including a plastic build, lack of weather sealing, heavy vignetting at wide apertures, and issues with, flare and corner softness.

The Samyang AF 24mm F2.8 FE is an ultra-lightweight, compact prime lens designed for Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras, offering a budget-friendly option at around USD 399. Weighing just 93 grams and measuring 37mm in length, it pairs perfectly with cameras like the Sony a7 III for low-profile street and travel photography. Mechanically, the lens features an internal focusing system so the front barrel doesn't rotate, alongside a smooth focus ring and a tiny lens hood. In real-world performance, its autofocus motor is silent, fast, and accurate, seamlessly supporting advanced native tracking features like eye-AF and continuous AF for both stills and video. Optically, the lens delivers good sharpness and excellent chromatic aberration control across the frame, reaching its peak performance when stopped down to F5.6. It also benefits from a short minimum focus distance of 24cm, though its 0.13x magnification ratio makes it poorly suited for true macro photography. The main cons of the lens include heavy vignetting across all apertures (which is easily fixed in post-processing), a minor barrel distortion, and an all-plastic build quality. Additionally, it can produce...

The B&H eXplora review highlights the Samyang AF 24mm f/2.8 FE as an ultra-compact, lightweight wide-angle prime for Sony E-mount cameras, praised for its responsive autofocus, sharp image quality, and excellent value. While delivering impressive optical performance, the lens features an all-polycarbonate plastic construction that feels less durable than metal-alloy alternatives.

The Samyang 24mm f/2.8 FE is an extremely light (93 grams) and compact pancake wide-angle lens designed for Sony full-frame E-mount cameras, though it can also be used on APS-C bodies where it acts as a 35mm equivalent. It features a fast and quiet autofocus mechanism, a minimum focusing distance of 23–24 centimeters, and relies effectively on Sony's in-body image stabilization (IBIS) rather than built-in stabilization. While it cannot quite match the optical performance of much more expensive rivals like the Zeiss Batis, its high center resolution—which peaks at f/8—and aggressive pricing provide an unbeatable price-to-performance ratio for travel and documentary photographers. The primary pros of this lens are its low price tag, excellent portability, built-in autofocus, and overall solid image quality. On the downside, the lens suffers from notable cons, including a susceptibility to internal reflections and ghosting during extreme backlighting scenarios due to the close proximity of the elements to the sensor. It also displays visible vignetting that requires in-camera or software lens corrections to manage, though a half-stop of corner shading remains even after stopping down past...

The Samyang AF 24 mm f/2.8 FE lens provides a compact, lightweight wide-angle option for Sony full-frame mirrorless cameras, but its optical resolution test yields underwhelming results. In the frame centre at the maximum aperture of f/2.8, the lens delivers a modest performance of just under 43 lpmm, which only sits slightly above the established decency level. The core strength of this lens is how quickly the centre sharpness improves when stopping down; it reaches a peak performance of nearly 58 lpmm at f/5.6, allowing users to capture reasonably sharp images. However, this peak still fails to impress compared to competitors like the Tokina Fírin 20 mm or even Samyang's own 35 mm f/2.8 FE, both of which easily exceed 60 lpmm. The major drawback of this lens is its weak edge-of-frame resolution on both APS-C and full-frame sensors near the maximum relative aperture. The reviewer notes that combining an ultra-small body and a wide angle of view so close to a large full-frame sensor creates demanding optical conditions where compromises went too far. To achieve acceptable image quality across...