PhotographyBlog: Samyang XP 50mm F1.2 Review

PhotographyBlog has released their Samyang XP 50mm F1.2 review today.

This honking big hunk of glass tested out well for them, as they have these things to say for a conclusion:

The build quality is outstanding, with the metal lens mount and housing adding to the high-quality feel, although the rubberised focusing ring does pickup dirt and fingerprints very easily. Samyang have also included a very good circular lens hood, although it's a very tight fit. As this is a manual-focus only lens, you'd expect this aspect of the operation to be intuitive, and so it proved, with the very wide focusing ring complete with hard stops and a large rotation angle of 180 degrees enabling smooth and precise focusing.

The price of the Samyang XP 50mm F1.2 is reasonable enough given the headline grabbing f/1.2 aperture, excellent image quality, and solid construction. There are some significant drawbacks with this lens, though, most notably the softness when shooting wide-open, its manual-focus-only nature (very tricky at f/1.2), the lack of any weather-sealing, and the sheer weight of it.

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