Samyang 7.5mm f/3.5 UMC Fisheye Lens Review

How to read our charts

Chromatic aberration is the lens' inability to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software.

Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more.

For this review, the lens was tested on an Olympus PEN EP-2 using Imatest.
Distortion is typical of a fisheye lens with straight line curving wildly when placed near the edges of the frame. However, this lens produces images with near stereographic projection, which results in more natural looking images than typically found with fisheye lenses that produce images with equal-area projection. This means objects placed near the edges of the frame don't look as squashed with the Samyang lens.

Due to the extreme angle of view, it isn't possible to formally test falloff of illumination towards the corners of the frame with fisheye lenses. In use, at f/3.5 and f/4 a slight falloff in brightness can be seen appearing gradually towards the corners, but this appears visually even by f/5.6.

Flare and loss of contrast when shooting with bright light sources in the frame are bot well controlled. A little flare may be seen with a bright point light source in the frame when shooting at wide apertures, but this is reduced as the lens is stopped down.

Add your message