Gear Rumors
Such A Tease! Samyang Teases Another Lens Release
Samyang has started a bit of a trend. With each of their last several lens announcements, the company has teased the lens ahead of time. Well, the company is at it again and has just released a new teaser on their Facebook page.
“With immense focus and unparalleled features, #Samyangoptics will introduce the latest product. Stay tuned.” The brief note on their Facebook page teases a new lens on the way, a lens the rumors believe will be a 100mm F/2.8 macro lens.
There is no indication what the ‘D-6″ in the image stands for, though maybe it could possibly be a time: ‘D’ for day, and the ‘6’ indicating 6 days until the announcement. Whatever the lens is should be a pretty big hit, as Samyang has been on a bit of a good streak, with their latest 135mm F/2 getting rave reviews.
Rumors suggest this could be their 100mm Macro, and if so it will be interesting to see where they price it, assuming the rumors are correct and that is what will soon be announced.
[via Photo Rumors]
UPDATE: Looks like Rokinon stole Samyang’s thunder:
http://goo.gl/2Xb6eO
Aren’t these supposed to be the exact same lenses with different brand logos on them? In other words, in the RokiBowYang of lens makers, why would Roki steal Yang’s thunder?
They’re all made in the same factory with the same parts on the same machines by the same slaves, but each company is it’s own entity. Basically the factory has a non-exclusive licensing deal with three companies.
Cosina did the same thing back in the day. They made a 19-35mm f/3.5-4.5 and it was licensed to Phoenix, Promaster, Soligor, Tamron, Vivitar, and Voigtländer (before they bought the name). Exact same lens except for the name on the front. I had one. It was awful.
@Anthony – I know, I appreciate that. I’m more annoyed at the spam for your benefit. I came from the early days of the Internet space in terms of provisioning an billing, so I have something of a hate on for spammer.
Those spammers are savvy to say the least. I’ve used all kinds of spam blockers and one day some Nikon Rumors forum troll ranted about me “advertising for Viagra and Cialis” and all kinds of heinous things (you know how those guys are). I never knew the spammers hacked my site and added all these links to fake pharmacies because whenever I logged in on my computer I was looking at a cached version.
I ended up having to scrap my whole site. I still haven’t gotten it back up yet (no viagra pun intended).
Rest assured John, we are doing our best. It is a constant struggle, we block them on way, and they find another. We do have some things we are working on, which will hopefully fix this for good.
I can’t wait for a dedicated macro and I love my other Samyang lenses. I shoot mostly manual anyway. Its how us old-timers would shoot daily. You learn to deal with slower shots but less throwaways. I’d love to also get the 14mm for some nice landscapes and milky way shooting. I currently have the 85mm 1.5 and 35mm 1.4 declicked. Love the lenses.
Seriously, you guys need to figure out a way to stop this spam. If I Google their idiot website, this site is now showing on the first page with no comment to see which lends the impression that the site is a source, not a target.
If nothing else, can you not key on the fact that first/last is always the same, as in always? Perhaps queue the account for confirmation or something? I mean, seriously, this spam comes through every day, especially on weekends, there can’t be a bayesian filter that would possibly miss it now. Have you looked at Akismet? It works.
As an aside, worth considering some flagging ability so that postings with some threshold of flags come off the page and go into a flag queue. If nothing else, I think that would drop the lifespan (almost said lifespam) of the post to minutes.
i bought their 14mm for landscapes and milky way photos and love it. For that specific purpose, the lack of autofocus was not a problem for me. Only thing keeping me from purchasing any more lenses from them is the lack of autofocus.
let’s just hope it will be just as affordable as the rest of the line-up. I can’t wait to get my hands on the 135 f2
Yeah. If you don’t mind the manual focusing, that Samyang 135mm f/2 looks *awfully* good from early reviews. See comparison to Canon’s famous old 135 f/2L here:
http://dustinabbott.net/2015/03/samyang-135mm-f2-ed-umc-review/
I actually don’t mind MF, I had the sammy 85 1.4 and it was an excellent lens
Meh. Autofocus or bust.
As a Canon user, Zeiss and Samyang are dead to me for everything other than tripod liveview work. :-P
Unless you’re shooting action, manual focus can work in a lot of situations. To this day, one of my all time favourite lenses was my Vivitar 105mm macro (the famous Lester Dine) in a the Pentax K-mount. A classic lens, razor sharp and very manual. Fun as all get out to use too.
John, you are absolutely right about MF being useful to many. But I see this as a lens you buy to shoot wide open or nearly wide open, and as an available light ‘as it happens’ sort of photographer, I seldom have the time to fight with MF. So, quick shooting + small DOF = a lot of misses in my hands. But YMMV, and with good technique, I’m sure you can net great shots with MF glass.
I have their 85mm 1.4 and it’s my favorite lens (also have the 14mm).. it’s just incredible. If I recall correctly you’re a canon guy so it’s a bit different for you then for a nikon user since they have a “chipped” version for Nikon that of course adds all the exif info but also lets it use the cameras focus confirmation dot which makes focusing rather easy… not as quick but it’s very easy.
I’ll admit at first I was hesitant to use it at a wedding but was forced into it and those images were the best ones of the day. Then I started using on portraits and even wide open it’s been fairly easy and I probably have fewer out of focus shots then when I use an af lens. I’ve even shots hummingbirds in flight and bees in flight with it. It’s super sharp, superb contrast and coloring, wonderful bokeh.
Look it up on dxo and it’s pretty damn impressive for the $$.
Im sure it’ll be great but it’s going to have to be under $300 to be a viable option since Tokina’s 100mm macro is pretty fantastic for only $399
I used to feel the same way about AF until I started shooting Leica. Now I find myself switching AF off on my Nikons quite often.
That being said, I doubt I’d ever buy a brand new manual focus lens for my Nikon although I have a couple of old Non-AI lenses for my Df. If I’m going to buy an expensive Zeiss, it’s gonna be an M-mount and I don’t really see the point in buying budget Korean lenses for my needs.
MF is just one of those things that the more you practice the better you get. I just came to a time in my life where I felt like AF was hindering me creatively. I felt like I was using a point and shoot, so I decided to switch up my game. It sparked my creativity for sure.
Granted, shooting bands in low-light with the Leica really made me step up my game in a hurry because I knew I had to nail the shots because coming back empty-handed wasn’t an option. I work better under pressure, I can’t say my experiences will mirror anyone else’s, but that’s my 2¢,
…Even for macro? I haven’t used autofocus for macro work since, well, I don’t think I’ve used AF for macro in the 10+ years that I’ve owned dedicated macro lenses. In fact the particular macro lens that I’ve owned for the last ~5 years IS manual focus; I sold my AF macro lens ~6 years ago…
Then again, sure many lenses these days need to be dual-purpose. And as plenty of Canon 100 L owners have discovered, a stabilized macro lens with good AF does make a decent portrait / telephoto lens.
Either way, the bottom line is that there is a huge market for what Rokinon offers: smooth, long-throw manual focus. Until you have to shoot cinema with a lens that has almost zero throw, or jerky, imprecise manual focus, you won’t understand.
So this isn’t the macro lens for you, or for many folks. That’s why there’s great AF macros from Sigma and Tamron and Tokina. I owned the Sigma 150 Macro and it was fantastic. But this lens will serve a purpose quite perfectly…
Matthew, see my first comment. I said “tripod liveview work” instead of “landscape work” for a reason. Macro was considered. :-P