Review on 📸 Rokinon Cine CV35-C 35mm T1.5 Aspherical Wide Angle Cine Lens - Non-Zoom for Canon EOS DSLR by Michael Schafer

I recently bought a Rokinon 85mm cine lens for a Sony a99 camera, mainly for video. I found I liked this particular lens so much that I started using it for photography as well. In fact, I love the sharpness of these files so much that I started looking for other Rokinon lenses for my camera. I had been researching this 35mm 1.5 cine lens for Sony Alpha cameras for a few weeks when I noticed one of those mysterious Revain price drops. It seemed like too much of a store to pass up, so I went ahead and bought it. I'm very glad I did. Important things to anticipate right away: This (35mm Rokinon cine lens) is absolutely a manual focus lens. There is no electronic interface between the lens and the camera. He's not focused on you. If you can't handle lens focusing yourself, then this lens isn't for you. No auto focus. But the lack of autofocus is part of the design and part of the appeal for me. That means there are far fewer things that can go wrong with this product. And most people who are serious about making films and video commercials use manual focus lenses because it gives them the most control over how their images look. If you're lucky enough to be shooting with Sony's new SLT cameras, manual focusing is made easy with the camera's built-in peak focusing feature. If you're shooting with the more prehistoric Nikon and Canon bodies, you'll probably want to use the lens on a tripod so you can rely on Live View and Zoom to get sharp focus. no electronic communication between camera and lens, no automation beyond what cameras with aperture priority control give you. I'm fine with that too, since I'm using the EVF and live view in real time, I can always "chirp" and see exactly what I'm getting while I'm shooting. This allows me to compensate and change settings on the fly if a scene appears too bright or too dark in my viewfinder. Since the camera has no idea what lens is in front or what the heck the lens is doing, there's no way to give you the full Exif data. You just have to experience it. The lens is huge too. Not too heavy but big in size. So the lens seems primitive by modern standards. What is required for this? Well, my quick tests showed that the lens sharpness is a bit harsh in the center and gets sharper as I close the aperture. At f5.6 it's as sharp as any lens I've played with in the last 20 years. According to photozone.de, this is a sharper lens than Canon 35mm 1.4L lenses costing over $1,400 and Nikon 35mm 1.4 lenses costing over $1,800. And it's both wide open and stopped down. Quite surprising for such a cheap lens. My work tends to be slow and thoughtful. I work on a client's complex layout or photograph a foot or photograph portraits. I'm not a marksman. The area I work in doesn't have a super-fast driving bonus. For me the lens works very, very well. I want a few things from a lens: I want high sharpness, I want good resolution, I want good contrast, I want good bokeh, and I want a lens that is well built and can be used by professionals for years. The Rok 35mm 1.5 has it all. Bonus: If you're shooting video, you'll find that it's nice to have a clickless aperture and geared focus ring. Click-free apertures mean you can make very subtle changes to exposure or focus while shooting, rather than having to endure half-stop jumps in exposure while the camera is rolling. The toothed focusing ring means that the lens can be used with focusing units already on the market without any problems. If you don't shoot video and are determined never to do so, consider the f1.4 non-cine version of this lens. The optics are the same (great) but the aperture stops with a click and the focus ring is just a regular focus ring. The bonus is that you save between $75 and $100. I feel like the 35mm and 85mm Rokinon lenses (Cine f1.5) are two lenses that I can take anywhere and do amazing work with. I rarely go wider, but I go longer. If I were starting my career from scratch I would certainly consider 35m, 85 and a99 as the base of my systems. Add some light and a tripod and I can take photos and great short films. When you compare this to what the big brands Sony, Canon and Nikon offer, it's clear that if you want to master the manual technique you end up getting the same good or better image quality for a fraction of the price. I would buy it again. In fact, I love it so much I might buy a second one as a backup. Another thought: this would make an awfully sharp 50mm equivalent on a cropped frame (APS-C) camera body.