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 ok, 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 ok, but not great, even stopped down
* very nice sun stars
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.
Here are a few sample images, all shot at f/11:
Jun 29, 2019 at 04:44 PM
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