A couple of months ago Samyang announced a new XP 10mm f/3.5 ultra-wide-angle lens. It seems like I’m one of the first people in the world who got a production sample of this lens.
Therefore I think a quick review could be interesting to people who are still on the fence whether they should get this lens or not.
The Samyang XP 10mm f/3.5 is one of the widest rectilinear full-frame lenses available. If you want to have significantly more field of view your only option is to use fisheye lenses.
The selection of rectilinear non-fisheye full-frame lenses with a focal length < 12mm is very limited. I only know 4 other lenses (the descriptions are based on many reviews I’ve read on the internet but not on personal experience):
* Canon 11-24mm f/4
* Canon EF-mount, but easily adaptable to Sony e-mount
* AF lens, EXIF info with intelligent adapter
* 180mm filter holder available from Nisi
* large and heavy (1180g)
* optical quality good, but not great, even stopped down
* Venus Optics Laowa 10-18mm f4.5-5.6
* Sony e-mount
* MF lens with no electronic interface and no EXIF info
* 37mm rear filter at the back of the lens (great feature!!!)
* small and light (496g)
* optical quality rather mediocre
* Voigtländer Heliar 10mm f/5.6
* Sony e-mount
* MF lens with electronic interface and EXIF info
* 150mm filter holder available from Nisi
* small and light (375g)
* optical quality good, but not great, even stopped down
* very nice sun stars and color rendition
The New Samyang XP 10mm f/3.5 is a welcome addition. Especially since all of the above lenses have certain weaknesses as pointed out.
It belongs to Samyang’s XP series which is their premium MF series. Build quality is very good. Much higher than the standard Samyang lenses and comparable in my opinion to lenses like the Zeiss Milvus. The manual focus feel is very nice and comparable to Zeiss lenses.
The XP 10mm is a manual focus lens but has an electronic interface. With an intelligent adapter (or on a Canon camera) you get full EXIF info and change the aperture via the camera.
The lens has a medium size and weight (780g), right in between the Canon and the Laowa/Voigtländer.
The optical quality of the XP series lenses is typically also very good. I had tested the Samyang XP 14mm in the past and the sharpness was extremely high, corner to corner even wide open at certain distances and focus settings. Just the field curvature of this lens was too strong for me.
Therefore my expectations regarding the optical quality of the XP 10mm were quite high.
I tested the lens during the last two days on my Sony A7RII using the Sigma MC-11 adapter. You can find all the details of the test and sample images with 100% crops and/or links to full-size images on my blog: https://wild-places.com/2019/06/29/review-of-the-samyang-xp-10mm-f3-5/
Short summary:
I think the Samyang 10mm XP is a keeper. It has a very nice rendering with good colors and a great sharpness stopped down to f/11.
Flare resistance is not very good but comparable to other ultra-wide-angle lenses.
Out of the currently available rectilinear full-frame wide-angle lenses below 12mm I think the Samyang is the best choice unless size and weight matter more than image quality.
Nice review, Boris! The quality looks pretty good.
I recently purchased the Voigtlander 10/5.6 and have to say it is MUCH better than "ok, but not great, even stopped down." I don't know if my copy is better than the ones you read about, but the image quality is very good. And compared to the Samyang with the MC-11 adapter, the Voigtlander is tiny in comparison, which makes it easier to put in the bag when out shooting. If you can you should really try it out. I think after comparing size, weight, and image quality, the Voigtlander would be your first choice by a large margin. Here are a few I've taken with the CV 10 recently.
mudlake wrote:
Nice review, Boris! The quality looks pretty good.
I recently purchased the Voigtlander 10/5.6 and have to say it is MUCH better than "ok, but not great, even stopped down." I don't know if my copy is better than the ones you read about, but the image quality is very good. And compared to the Samyang with the MC-11 adapter, the Voigtlander is tiny in comparison, which makes it easier to put in the bag when out shooting. If you can you should really try it out. I think after comparing size, weight, and image quality, the Voigtlander would be your first choice by a large margin. Here are a few I've taken with the CV 10 recently....Show more →
Thanks! One of the problems with the Voigtländer wide-angle lenses is sample variation. I tried 5 samples of the CV 15mm and all 5 had bad corner sharpness with IQ much worse than the XP 10mm. And it seems pretty much consensus that the CV 10 is the weakest of the three Voigtländer ultra-wide-angle lenses regarding IQ.
But of course I would be happy if CV 10mm lenses exist with IQ better or similar to the XP 10mm. I could save a lot of weight and space and solve my current ND filter problem.
One wide open and one at best aperture (f/11?). That would be great.
Regarding my description of the IQ of the CV10 beeing just 'ok, but not great' I will change this (together with the Canon) to 'good, but not great'. It's a better expression of what I wanted to say. Ok is probably too negative.
Sadly no astro/coma tests. There is too much light pollution here for any astro shots. But for me this is probably not an astro lens anyway because you have to stop it down to at least f/5.6 or f/8 to get good overall sharpness, which is not fast enough for astro.
I looked through the FM archives regarding the CV 10mm.
Here are some opinions I found:
Jordan (Jman13 ): "The copy I tested was very good. The corners don't ever get super sharp, but they get decent, and the edges do get quite sharp stopped down."
Kirin: "From what I can tell, the lens is very sharp across about 85% of the frame, but gets quite soft in the corners and also displays a lot of purple fringing."
Charlie N: "Corners aren't perfect, but they don't smear either."
DannyBurkPhoto: "My experience is about the same here - it gradually goes rather soft toward the ends. Very sharp in the central 50-60%."
DavidBM: "I've never seen a copy with really crisp corners. I think that that's the price you pay for something this wide and compact. I find the performance acceptable for what it is."
Neurad1: "I had a copy of the 10 and the corners/edges were VERY soft. I returned it and haven't yet decided whether to try another."
Fred Miranda: "It's sharp center and mid-zone wide open. (...)
With my copy, the very extreme corners are not smeared but never get very sharp."
BastianK: "Corners didn't look really good on 12mp, corners don't look really good on 42mp either. I might add: in absolute terms. For a 10mm the performance is definitely not bad."
There were also many sample images including 100% crops posted. I think my conclusion that the Samyang XP 10mm has better corner sharpness stopped down to f/11 is still valid. But on the other hand the Voigtländer 10mm is significantly lighter and smaller, can use ND filters with the Nisi holder and has beautiful sunstars.
Looking at your samples that 10mm Samyang seems to have massive green color cast in the corners, even worse than the other ultra wide angle lenses.
And those church windows close to the borders don't look any better than what I got out of the CV 10 either.
BastianK wrote:
Looking at your samples that 10mm Samyang seems to have massive green color cast in the corners, even worse than the other ultra wide angle lenses.
And those church windows close to the borders don't look any better than what I got out of the CV 10 either.
Regarding the color cast in the corners: In some of the images I see it in others not. I will have to look further into this issue. But in the end I have to probably build a custom profile in LR.
A direct comparison of the same scenes with the CV 10 would be great. So far I'm only 100% sure that the XP 10 is much better than the 5 samples of the CV 15 I tried. But this says more about the sample variation of the CV 15 than about the XP 10.
Bobu wrote:
Thanks! One of the problems with the Voigtländer wide-angle lenses is sample variation. I tried 5 samples of the CV 15mm and all 5 had bad corner sharpness with IQ much worse than the XP 10mm. And it seems pretty much consensus that the CV 10 is the weakest of the three Voigtländer ultra-wide-angle lenses regarding IQ.
But of course I would be happy if CV 10mm lenses exist with IQ better or similar to the XP 10mm. I could save a lot of weight and space and solve my current ND filter problem.
One wide open and one at best aperture (f/11?). That would be great.
Regarding my description of the IQ of the CV10 beeing just 'ok, but not great' I will change this (together with the Canon) to 'good, but not great'. It's a better expression of what I wanted to say. Ok is probably too negative.
Ok. I'm not great at this, but here are some corner crops from the CV 10. First is the overall scene. Second image is the corner at f5.6. Last image is corner at f11. The corner shots are at close to 300%, so at 100% they obviously would look much better.
Thanks mudlake. The corner crops look slightly worse than my XP 10 corners (at 300%), both at f/5.6 and at f/11. But the difference is not huge. Since the CV 10 is much smaller I can understand why people would choose this lens over the XP 10.
Bobu wrote:
And lovely images you shot with your CV 10mm. It's not easy to find good compositions with such a wide lens.
It might be because I’m a novice and not really used to wide angle, but I’m finding it hard to compose even with 24mm. I can’t imagine how hard it is at 10. Wonder if that improves over time.
derKoekje wrote:
It might be because I’m a novice and not really used to wide angle, but I’m finding it hard to compose even with 24mm. I can’t imagine how hard it is at 10. Wonder if that improves over time.
Who is really good with natural looking 11mm ultra wide compositions (using the Canon 11-24 lens) is Mark Metternich (see FM landscape forum). But he has lots of experience, both as a professional landscape photographer and using ultra wide angle lenses. It definitely makes sense to look for his images and learn from his compositions.
I just received a brand new CV 10/5.6 E-mount to compare to my CV 12/5.6 (which I have a great copy). It's like night and day for the extreme corners. I can't believe Voigtlander discontinued this lens!
Here are they at f/7.1:
PS: I don't remember this smear towards the extreme corners when I tested the CV 10/5.6 two years ago but improves greatly at ~ f/11.
Very sharp corners on the 12. A rectilinear 10mm may be much harder to correct that well into the corners. The angle of view on the 10mm is much wider than the 12. After using the 10mm for a while, my 15mm feels telephoto. For my use, the Voigt 10mm is MORE than good enough. Even printed at 40x60” the sharpness is sufficient. No one is going to be looking at my prints with a magnifying glass!🙂. That said, I WOULD love that 12mm!
