Samyang 14 mm f/2.8 IF ED MC Aspherical review - Build quality

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Samyang 14 mm f/2.8 IF ED MC Aspherical

6 October 2009

Arkadiusz Olech

3. Build quality

The first striking thing, when we take Samyang in our hands, is an enormous and convex front lens. It is of really large dimensions and it’s been surrounded with a built-in petal lens hood. Right behind it, there’s a broad, corrugated and convenient manual focusing ring. The ring works smoothly, but with an appropriate resistance. There are no reservations to its work. There’s a distance scale imprinted on it, expressed in feet and meters.

Samyang 14 mm f/2.8 IF ED MC Aspherical - Build quality

Right behind the ring, there’s a small and fixed fragment of a metal body with a 14 mm 1:2.8ED ASPHERICAL IF inscription. Moving towards the bayonet, we find a narrow aperture ring which, contrary to the model of 8 mm focal length, works with an appropriate resistance. We can choose an aperture value withe a 1/2 EV step.

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At the very end, we find a metal bayonet which surrounds a fixed rear lens of about 17 mm diameter.

How does Samyang 14 mm come out compared to its rivals? Our table shows the comparison of its parameters with other lenses of this class. As you can see, as far as weight and dimensions go, all the lenses make a dense and homogeneous group. Samyang falls behind the more expensive lenses only by the minimum focusing distance, being it 0.28 meter, while in Sigma and Nikkor it can be as little as 0.18-0.2 meter.

Its inner construction is similar as well. All the 14 mm lenses discussed, consist of 14 elements. In the case of Samyang, they’ve been put in 12 groups, two lenses have been made of low-dispersion ED glass, and two others have an aspherical shape.