Product Review "Rokinon 24mm f2.8 AF Lens"
Hey everyone! I just added a new lens to my kit, the Rokinon 24mm f2.8 AF (Yes, Auto Focus!) lens. If you don't know the name Rokinon in lenses, you're in for a treat. Made in Korea by Samyang Optics, the Rokinon name is for lenses sold in the US. Everywhere else its name is Samyang. I don't really know the reason for this, but it's the same lens. I have used Rokinon in the past, and they are known for their inexpensiveness, sharpness, and build quality. They are built like a tank. The other thing that they are known for is that they are mostly manual focus lenses and just in the last year have started putting
out AF lenses. I have been pleased with the quality of the lenses that I have had in the past, and when I saw this one I had to give it a try. I own a 14mm f2.8 that I used when I had my full frame Nikon D800, and it was awesome! I used it for wide-focus situations and night photography. It is a very sharp lens! When I changed my camera setup to crop sensor Sony A6300, I got the 12mm f2.0 lens with the Sony mount, another very sharp lens, and I use it mainly for astrophotography. Both of these lenses are manual focus. But with this wide of a focal range, the depth of field is very large and easy to focus with a manual focus lens.
If you have been following me on Instagram or Flickr, you know that recently I have been shooting a lot of street-type photography. I have been doing a lot of photo walks of different towns and cities. Now I'm going to start talking about effective focal length of some lenses. Let me explain. On a full frame camera, the effective focal length of a 50mm lens is 50mm. But on a crop sensor camera like mine, the sensor size is 1-1/2 times smaller than a full frame sensor camera, so you must multiply the focal length of the lens by 1.5 to give you the full frame equivalent size. Sorry for the photography geekiness. For my street
photography or photo walks, my kit is very small, and my main lens has been a Sony 35mm f1.8 lens (52mm effective focal length). This is a great lens but tends to get a little tight in certain situations. The other lens that I carry with me is a Sony 10-18mm f4 lens (15-25mm effective focal length), which is great for architecture-type photography but too wide for everything else. So I started looking for something in the middle and couldn't find anything in the Sony line up that would give me approximately 35mm effective focal length, which comes to about 23mm. Then I came across the Rokinon 24mm f2.8 AF lens that has just came out a month or so ago. I got on B&H photo website and found that they haven't even shipped yet in the States, so I went and ordered one. And by luck it shipped the next day. This lens gives me the focal length that I was looking for in between my 10-18mm and the 35mm that I have, and so far it's the perfect focal length for street photowalk-type photography.
It's a small lens, which is great for my kit! It keeps the weight down. It's just a little bit smaller than my 35mm and it's lightweight. The autofocus is very snappy with little or no distortion that I can tell. I took it to the Raleigh Union Station yesterday to try it out, and it worked great, just wide enough to capture the scene but not too wide. I have some sample photos here so you can see the sharpness of the lens and the difference between my 35mm (effective focal length 52) and the 24mm (effective focal length 36mm). So if you're looking for an affordable alternative to the more expensive lenses, I recommend the Rokinon line of lenses. So get out and keep shooting!
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