Samyang SY14M-E 14mm F2.8 Ultra Wide Lens for Sony E-Mount

Well this is a little hard to give a clear review . Im sure my Samyang arrived faulty & or miss-aligned. But lets start with my initial out of box check,,, Infinity point, all-though hard to find was closer to the 10m marking,, this did not bother me as other reviews also state this issue, It did seem quite sharp but on closer inspection was slightly soft & hazey in the centre & outer edges,,, outer edge aberration was not bad but I was expecting better,,, obviously a little worse @ F2.8 ,,, I threw on my Canon 16-35 as a bench mark,, the stark difference was apparent, especially the centre focus area, my Canon was so much sharper.. I decided it was a cheep lens and I would put up with it,,,, Then, over a two week period with this lens in my Carry Kit & rarely used seemed to be changing between use,,, it became much worse,,, Infinity point was moving ! & the outer aberration was getting much much worse,,, central haze now through all F stops. Infinity was now between .5 m & .7m Something must be coming adrift internally ? So my end result was to return this lens as it was now quite unuseable,,, I would love to try a good one of these,, but after paying very expensive return post from Australia,,, well Im not keen on getting another with same possible issues,,,, It does seem quality control is very hit & miss. I will take a deep breath & decide what to do after the return process is complete.. Cheers Craig

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This is the second lens I received from Amazon after returning the first for the same issues (only this one may even be slightly worse). When using the live view function of my camera zoomed all the way in on a distant point source of light like a star, the light gradually gets smaller and smaller, but does not quite make it to "pinpoint" focus before the focus ring runs up against the stop. Most lenses will actually focus PAST the infinity focus point, but both of my examples exhibit this same behavior where they do not quite reach infinity focus. The next big issue is the coma that is apparent (likely because they cant completely focus) at f2.8 wide open. this disappears completely if you stop down to f5.6, but that totally defeats my reason for buying this lens, which is a fast, wide angle lens for astrophotography. I have 18mm f3.5 zooms that can focus to a pinpoint that would be better than stopping this lens down to f5.6, so its totally useless for my purposes. I did rate it a 4 out of 5 for material quality as it appears to be solidly built, but I gave it two stars for image quality and two stars overall. The reason I even gave it two stars is as a landscape lens stopped down to f5.6 it should be a great performer, but I didnt buy an f2.8 to use f5.6 all the time. These lenses generally get good reviews so Im sort of sad that I got two duds in a row. Another odd effect is that the coma-like distortion appears to all run in the same direction (but does not appear to be astigmatism) regardless of the position within the frame, and it should be noted that the image I attached was taken on a crop sensor so it would only be worse on a full frame.

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