Samyang 50mm f/1.2 AS UMC CS review – Introduction

When I reviewed the Samyang 21mm f/1.4 ED AS UMC CS in AP 20 February, I also referred to the Samyang 50mm f/1.2 AS UMC CS – a lens that, like the 21mm f/1.4, has been designed with today’s mirrorless users in mind. Both lenses arrived in the office within the space of a week of each other, and having been blown away by the image quality performance of the 21mm f/1.4, I was eager to break Samyang’s 50mm f/1.2 out of its box to discover if it was just as good.
To recap, the 50mm f/1.2 AS UMC CS is one of a pair of manual focus lenses to have been recently added to Samyang’s mirrorless line-up. It is available in four mirrorless camera mounts catering for Canon EF-M, Fujifilm X, Micro Four Thirds and Sony E-mount users. The main appeal of this lens is its bright f/1.2 aperture and its price, which, at under £300, seems a bargain.
We’re used to seeing fast f/1.2 primes fetching prices around four figures, so it’s refreshing to see a more affordable example being made for those who own smaller compact system cameras. Mounted to a mirrorless camera with an APS-C sized sensor, this lens is equivalent to 75mm, whereas it’s comparable to a 80mm fixed lens attached to a Canon EF-M mount camera and a 100mm fixed lens on Micro Four Thirds. Whatever system this lens is used with, it will appeal to photographers who would like to shoot close-cropped portraits or other subjects requiring a short, fast telephoto lens.
  

This lens has a different internal construction from the 21mm f/1.4 ED AS UMC CS lens we reviewed in February. Rather than employing an arrangement of eight elements in seven groups, this lens features a construction of nine elements in seven groups. The lens benefits from a nine-blade aperture to ensure out-of-focus points of lights (or bokeh) are portrayed circular. It’s possible to make out these nine aperture blades when you peer down the barrel of the lens and rotate the aperture ring across its f/1.2-f/16 range.

Shooting towards the sun revealed lens flare in a few of the images

To minimise colour aberrations and ensure the highest contrast across the frame at all apertures, the Samyang features two aspherical lenses. These are abbreviated to AS in its product name. The UMC abbreviation that follows refers to Samyang’s ultra-multi-coating technology, which is applied to optimise light transmission and minimise unwanted artefacts such as internal reflections, flare and ghosting.
As mentioned earlier, the lens is manual-focus only and features no optical stabilisation to counteract the effects of handshake. The lack of autofocus and optical stabilisation won’t satisfy all users, but their absence does have the advantage of helping to keep the lens reasonably lightweight. On the scales it’s 95g heavier than Samyang’s wider 21mm f/1.4 prime lens, but still weighs less than 400g, which is impressive for a lens that feels solidly built with a fast f/1.2 aperture.

At the rear, the lens employs a good-quality metal mount, but there are no metal contacts to form an electronic connection between the camera and lens, meaning the EXIF data recorded by the camera won’t offer any information about the focal length or aperture used. If you’d like to keep a record of your aperture settings, you’ll need to put pen to paper much like I did throughout my testing.
The filter thread doesn’t rotate when the manual-focus ring is turned, but users should be aware that the front element does move back and forth. The lens comes supplied with a detachable circular- shaped lens hood that secures with a reassuring click, and it’s possible to reverse it when storing the lens in a bag. For those who’d like to know how close they can focus, it has a 50cm minimum focus distance.