Rokinon 8mm Fish Eye

Having the itch for a new lens...and carrying on the New year new lens tradition, I decided I needed fish eye.  Having had my eye on the Canon 8-15mm fish eye zoom for a while, I realized that $1400 for a niche lens wasn't the greatest investment.  As I searched for alternatives, I came across this Rokinon 8mm fish eye.  Its sold under many different names, but essentially made by the Korean Samyang corporation.  All the reviews showed impressive performance for the sub $300 price. The drawbacks are manual focus and manual aperture.  Luckily, fish eyes have so much DOF that you hardly need to focus for anything from 3 ft to infinity.  I quickly purchased it on Amazon prime, then promptly got my first lens stolen from my door step because the horrible On Trac delivery service was to lazy to deliver it to the leasing office of my apartment.  Once I got the replacement, I took it out for a test.  The lens is designed for APS-C cameras, so it severly vignetted on my 5D2 but wasn't so bad on the 1.3x crop 1DIII.  I just cropped in a bit in post processing.  The Canon fisheye at 8mm is not full frame either, so the performance is similar.  Here are some test shots.

Comments

[Doug]

Can't you just do that in PhotoShop? LOL. Always nice to get a new piece of glass.

[Vu]

Of course, but I like to do less work :)

[high def optometry]

Samyang Optics (Korea) is offering SLR lenses for many years but recently they've gained some higher visibility & popularity due to some quite exiting new products like the recently reviewed Samyang 85mm f/1.4 and the Samyang 8mm f/3.5 CS Fisheye which we'll cover in this test report. Samyang lenses are also marketed by several other companies like Vivitar (7mm f/3.5), Bower (8mm f/3.5), Opteka (6.5mm f/3.5), Walimex (8mm f/3.5) and probably a couple more.