Samyang AF 50mm F 1 4 FE Review | 54 Data compared

The ePHOTOzine review highlights the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE as a landmark, budget-friendly autofocus lens for Sony full-frame cameras, offering excellent value, robust build quality, and creamy, smooth bokeh ideal for portraiture. However, the lens is limited by audible, slower autofocus performance, lack of weather sealing, and corner sharpness that requires stopping down to f/4 or f/5.6 for optimal results.

The Trusted Reviews evaluation of the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE highlights a budget-friendly, fast standard prime lens for Sony mirrorless cameras, featuring a bright f/1.4 aperture for excellent low-light performance and bokeh, plus three aspherical elements to reduce aberrations. The lens, which boasts an internal focusing design and effective UMC coating, produces strong center sharpness, although it exhibits a standard 45cm minimum focus distance and noticeable vignetting when shooting wide open. Overall, the review positions it as an appealing, cost-effective alternative to native Sony glass.

Dustin Abbott's 2018 review characterizes the Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE as an affordable, metal-built lens featuring excellent, soft bokeh, high light transmission, and minimal distortion, making it a viable, budget-friendly portrait option. Conversely, the lens is limited by noisy, slow autofocus, a lack of weather sealing, and soft image quality with significant aberrations and heavy vignetting at f/1.4, resulting in a generally underwhelming, "primitive" performance compared to modern alternatives.

The Samyang AF 50mm f/1.4 FE is an excellent, bright standard lens engineered for full-frame Sony E-mount cameras, offering direct, budget-friendly competition to the Sony 50mm f/1.4 GM. Optically, the lens delivers impressive performance with a high overall review score of 92. Its standout features include a relatively low price, a bright f/1.4 maximum aperture that is highly usable in low-light conditions, and a remarkably beautiful bokeh that outperforms many 85mm portrait lenses due to its large lens elements. The image quality is characterised by high contrast, outstanding sharpness from f/2.8 onwards, and negligible RAW vignetting when stopped down.

The Rokinon/Samyang AF 50mm F1.4 FE for Sony E-mount offers a budget-friendly $500 alternative to premium lenses, featuring a solid metal, dense build quality and a 67mm filter ring. It provides a fast f/1.4 maximum aperture that produces usable images capable of responding well to post-capture sharpening. DPReview However, the lens has notable drawbacks, as it is not very sharp when shot wide open at f/1.4, requiring stopping down or digital sharpening for crisp results. Furthermore, despite being lighter than some alternatives, the 645g weight is described as heavy and cumbersome, causing the reviewer to prefer smaller, more lightweight options.

The LensTip review of the Samyang AF 50 mm f/1.4 FE details the Korean manufacturer's transition from cheap, manual CCTV and telephoto glass into the modern autofocus market, marking this 2016 model as one of its very first autofocus lenses specifically designed for Sony mirrorless cameras. On the positive side, the lens delivers good image quality in the frame centre along with acceptable resolution across the edges of both APS-C and full-frame sensors. Optically, it excels at managing lateral chromatic aberration, keeping it completely error-free, while also maintaining negligible distortion levels and minimal vignetting when paired with smaller APS-C sensors. However, LensTip noted several optical shortcomings that made it feel less successful than some of its contemporary peers. The most prominent flaws include a soft image when shot wide open at its maximum f/1.4 relative aperture, as well as excessive longitudinal chromatic aberration and notable spherical aberration issues. Furthermore, the lens suffers from huge coma that remains visible even when stopping down the aperture by 2 EV, struggles with unsatisfactory performance against bright light (ghosting/flares), and displays distinct vignetting artifacts...

The Samyang-Rokinon 50mm f/1.4 AF for Sony E-mount is a solid first foray into autofocus lenses for the brand, offering impressive optical performance at a highly competitive price of around $700. Built with a robust metal barrel and a comfortable fly-by-wire focus ring, the lens delivers sharp images through most of its aperture range, peaking in sharpness around f/5.6. Its fast f/1.4 aperture creates a beautifully shallow depth of field, rendering a creamy bokeh with smooth background transitions and mostly uniform, round specular highlights. Furthermore, it includes a petal-shaped lens hood that successfully eliminates flare and ghosting, and it already features a dedicated correction profile in Lightroom to easily fix minor barrel distortion and heavy vignetting. However, the lens has several notable drawbacks, most significantly a loud autofocus mechanism that is audible during operation and can easily ruin video footage. While the AF performance is reasonably quick, it still lags behind native Sony lenses. Physically, the lens is heavy (585g) and bulky, making it poorly balanced for Sony's smaller APS-C camera bodies. Optically, users will have to contend with invasive...

The PCMag review characterizes the Rokinon 50mm F1.4 AF for Sony E-mount as a solid, budget-friendly prime lens, offering strong build quality and minimal distortion for full-frame mirrorless users. While it produces impressive, sharp images when stopped down, the lens struggles with softness at its maximum f/1.4 aperture, features a slower autofocus system compared to native options, and lacks environmental sealing.