Samyang 12 mm f/2.0 NCS CS
5. Chromatic and spherical aberration
Fast wide-angle lenses can have a significant level of longitudinal chromatic aberration and anybody who has had an opportunity to use full frame lenses e.g. the 1.4/24 knows it very well. The Samyang 2/12 didn’t manage to deal with that problem well either and the photo below shows it clearly.
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Overall it seems correcting any chromatic aberration at all is not the Samyang’s thing – it has a lot of problems with the lateral version as well. The lateral aberration is a noticeable factor deteriorating the image quality on the frame edge; its volume correlates weakly with the aperture value and amounts to about 0.15% no matter what aperture you apply. Of course to see its full level you have to consult RAW files because the camera’s software tries to remove it from the JPEGs so its level is a bit lowered on them.
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Spherical aberration
The lens didn’t have any ‘focus shift’ effect so we don’t have any reasons to suspect it has any problems with the spherical aberration correction. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to make our standard test with defocused light points. The depth of field, provided by the lens, is so significant that we simply couldn’t get circles of light of a sensible size in front of and behind the focal point.
