In the first of eight new lens announcements coming in the spring of this year, Samyang has unveiled the XP 10mm f/3.5 ultra wide-angle prime lens for Canon and Nikon full-frame DSLRs.
Touted by Samyang as the "world's widest angle of view" for a rectilinear prime lens and as being "distortion free," the new XP 10mm f/3.5 will provide an astounding 130-degree angle of view. While "distortion free" in my experience usually means distortion is still present but in a small amount, if Samyang was capable of minimizing its effect at such a wide focal length that would still be plenty useful. The company also stated that the XP 10mm is suited for high-resolution cameras of "more than 50 megapixels" and 8K cinematography.
Sizing it up, the new lens is 3.86 inches (98.1 millimeters) long, has a maximum diameter of 3.74 inches (95 millimeters) and weighs 1.61 pounds (731 grams). The minimum focusing distance is 0.85 feet (0.26 meters).
Inside the manual focus, metal body lens are 18 elements in 11 groups. Three of these elements are aspherical, three are extra-low dispersion, and one is a high-refractive lens. These serve to control ghosting and flare, along with Samyang's Ultra Multi Coating (UMC). The lens uses seven aperture blades, while the aperture range is f/3.5 to f/22. There are no filter threads due to the bulbous front elements and built-in lens hood, not to mention the vignetting considerations with such a wide angle of view.
The Samyang XP 10mm f/3.5 has a suggested retail price of €1,099 ($1,247 with today's exchange rate) and will be available this spring.
Would love to try this on some of the small RE interiors I have to do sometimes. Looks awesome!
I look at Samyang lenses and think it would be a good way to populate my lens collection with nice primes. But I'm 'lazy' and really do prefer autofocus. Although, for landscape stuff that I can take my time with, this lens might just push me into the manual focus realm.
I think that many would like manual focus only for this kind of a lens.
There is really no need to focus
I've never really thought of autofocus as "lazy" so much as just letting a machine handle an entirely mechanical task so that you can better engage in the actual creative aspect of image making.
Sounds like something a lazy person would say ;)
My son's a wedding/event photographer and while he uses his 24-70 and 70-200 a lot, he uses Zeiss lenses for his more or less static shoots, portraits and the like. He's always poking me to get a couple of Zeiss lenses, but I'm retired and don't have the discretionary funds like I used to. He's quite good at getting focus quickly with those very nice lenses.
I rented the Canon T/S 24mm II as my first manual focus experience and was surprised how quick I could focus it. If my funds weren’t going to one of those first I’d try one these out!
With 10mm f/3.5 you might as well tape the focus ring to infinity. Can't get more lazy than that :-)
Exactly! ;)
I use the Irix 11mm and it's fantastic, and it's about ~$500. (Note to self: "about" and "~" may be redundant.) I only use it a few times a year, but when I need it do I ever need it. I look forward to trying out this and seeing the difference.
A reminder that as we all know the level of distortion can be critical in the "effective" wideness of the lens. Some lenses are wonderfully wide but there is so much barrel distortion that by the time you correct for it you've lost 1-1.5mm worth of wideness in your final output.
Will pass with the price tag I would expect auto focus to come with it.