Introduction

Many lenses I review these days are simply “more of the same”: Another 35mm 2.0, 50mm 1.8 or 85mm 1.4 with minor differences compared to the competitors. This Samyang Remaster Slim kit is a different story though. It consists of a pancake sized AF module and three optical blocks (21mm 3.5, 28mm 3.5 and 32mm 2.8) that can be interchanged. The E-mount pancake lenses I reviewed so far all came with too many compromises and many didn’t even feature AF. Can this set of three be any good? Let’s find out in this review.

Sample Images

You can find most of the sample pictures in full resolution here.

Specifications

This kit consists of an AF module and three optical block lens inserts. The AF module has the following specifications:

• Diameter: 63 mm
• Length: 19.5 mm 
• Weight: 58g (without caps)
• Filter Diameter: 49 mm
• Mount: E-mount

The three optical blocks have the following specifications:

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Handling / Build Quality

This is not your usual lens, as it consists of an AF module and three interchangeable lens blocks. The lens blocks are attached via a small bayonet but without a locking knob. You can exchange the optical blocks even when the camera is turned on, but it is a rather fiddly endeavour, if you are wearing gloves an impossible one I would say. Some other users also reported that sometimes the electronic connection between optical block and AF module does not work immediately and this also happened to me once.

To my utmost surprise the AF module even features an AF/MF switch. It also comes with a 49mm filter thread which does not rotate during focus operation. The manual focus is unsurprisingly by wire.

The outside is made from polycarbonate which is in line with many of Samyang’s other affordable AF lenses. There are no lens hoods available for the optical blocks.

I tried using this lens with the Megadap, Viltrox and Neewer ETZ adapters on my Nikon Zf. AF is (as usual) fastest with the Megadap, but the f/3.5 lenses are being recognized as f/3.3 lenses. With the Neewer adapter they are recognized correctly, but the AF is a little slower. With both these adapters also changing the lens block while the camera is turned on works without any issues. The lens is mechanically incompatible to the Viltrox adapter, it won’t even mount.

Autofocus

I am not shooting sports or fast moving animals/humans so if you want to know if the lens is fast enough for this, or how it compares to other lenses in this segment, you may have to look for a different review with a more detailed assessment of this aspect.

The AF is a simply unit focus design where the whole optical blocks are moved back and forth – similar to the Leica M to Sony E AF adapters. 

The AF generally works well, but it is a bit on the noisy side and not particularly fast.

Vignetting

Light Falloff

These are tiny lenses, so high vignetting figures should not come as a surprise, they are still comparable to other pancake lenses though.

Sadly stopping down only makes a bit of a difference with the 28mm, on the other two the amount of vignetting stays the same even on stopping down a lot. 

It is recommended to have a look at this article first to get an idea how this brightness graph works.

Optical Vignetting

Fast lenses usually show a noticeable amount of optical vignetting, especially so the compact ones. Now these lenses are not that fast but very slow, so I decided to check how the 32mm looks like here.

Without going too much into technical details optical vignetting leads to the truncation of light circles towards the borders of the frame.
In the center of the frame almost every lens will render a perfect circle, but only lenses with very low optical vignetting will keep this shape in the corners.
So in the following comparison we move from the center (left) to the extreme corner (right) and see how the shape of the light circle changes.

The amount of optical vignetting is not super high (we have seen worse), but still what we see here is not very pretty: very strong onion rings (plastic molded elements might be more prone to this than glass molded ones) and off center also the shape is not exactly close to a circle. I already wonder what we will uncover in the bokeh section…

Sharpness

Focus Shift

21mm 3.5

28mm 3.5

32mm 2.8

As these are AF lenses for mirrorless they will usually focus at working aperture, where focus shift would not really be an issue, but for the sake of checking, I still checked.

The 28mm 3.5 shows a bit of focus shift, the others are free from it.

infinity (42mp Sony A7rII)

First thing I have to mention even though it should be obvious: these are not lenses that will rival your premium high end primes in terms of resolution and contrast. Also not your latest high end zoom lenses. It is simply not possible in this size and at this price point.

The 21mm 3.5 is the weakest of the set – which doesn’t come as much of a surprise. While the center looks decent at f/3.5 (with some minor color aberrations) neither midframe nor corners look particularly good. This lens looks best at f/11, where it shows a good but certainly not an amazing across frame performance.

The 28mm 3.5 does not only have the highest amount of special elements, it also looks like the best performer here. Decent across frame from f/3.5, best performance at f/5.6 to f/8.0.

The 32mm 2.8 is somewhere inbetween. The midzone dip is rather significant but the corners don’t look that bad even at wider apertures. At f/8.0 also here you can get a very clean across frame performance. 

Generally – also compared to other pancake lenses – this Samyang Remaster set performed better than I would have expected. At their maximum aperture the 28mm and 32mm surely leave something to be desired, but stopped down all three are able to create good across frame sharpness. 

close (42mp Sony A7rII)

21mm 3.5

28mm 3.5

32mm 2.8

The 21mm and the 32mm look surprisingly good at their maximum aperture whereas the 28mm greatly benefits from stopping down by about one stop.

As the 28mm performed best at infinity out of these three, it might just have been optimized for longer distances.

Generally also at closer distances these lenses performed better than I would have expected.

Flare resistance

I was very skeptical how the three lenses will perform in this category. First, Samyang lenses haven’t exactly been stellar performers in this category. Second, they make use of plastic elements and as far as I know they are more prone to showing some issues here.

21mm 3.5

I increased the blacks a bit to make any artefacts more visible. This does decrease the contrast a bit, but still it looks to me like the contrast is generally a bit lower around the point light source. Ghosting is not really a problem, but stopped down you may encounter very big ring flares here.

28mm 3.5

Except for some smaller ghosts under specific conditions the 28mm lens looks pretty good to me.

32mm 2.8

Also here we can clearly see lower contrast around the point light source, stopped down also in combination with some huge sunstar artefacts. With the sun in the corner of the frame also a big ghost can appear in the opposite corner.

Ghosting is not really a problem with these lenses, but contrast is definitely lowered with strong point light sources in the frame, which I think the plastic elements are to blame for. Still, most of the other pancake lenses we reviewed (except for the expensive Nikon Z 26mm 2.8) actually did worse in this category.

Coma correction

21mm 3.5

28mm 3.5

32mm 2.8

Correcting Coma well is generally something high on Samyang’s priority list when designing lenses. When it comes to these low cost pancake designs they obviously had to make some compromises though.

Generally the performance here mirrors what we have seen in the sharpness infinity section: the 28mm looks the best with comparably small artefacts at its maximum aperture whereas the 21mm and 32mm show noticeably bigger artefacts at their maximum aperture.

For best rendering of point light sources all these lenses are best stopped down to f/8.0 to f/11.

Again, most of the pancake lenses I reviewed so far did worse here, the exceptions are the Nikon Z 26mm 2.8 and the Viltrox AF 28mm 4.5.

Distortion

If this was a zoom lens with 21, 28 and 32mm I would say the distortion pattern is very typical for a zoom lens: the 21mm shows strong and wavy barrel distortion, the 32mm shows strong pincushion distortion and the 28mm is inbetween and almost free from distortion. 

There are no profiles in Lightroom available to correct these lenses and Samyang also doesn’t offer profiles on their homepage. For the 21mm 3.5 a reader told me that the profile for the Samyang 16mm 2.8 AF works quite well when set to something between 40 to 50% and I can confirm that. You can download the profile for the 16mm lens here. The 32mm shows a mostly uniform distortion pattern, so with the value above you can correct it quite well.

Sunstars

21mm 3.5

28mm 3.5

32mm 2.8

We can make some interesting observations here. Most Samyang lenses I reviewed feature an aperture diaphragm made of 9 rounded blades with questionable alignment as they usually produced rather messy sunstars.

Now these small lenses feature diaphragms made of 7 aperture blades and stopped down to f/8.0 to f/22 they create well defined sunstars, better than most of Samyang’s more expensive lenses.

The 28mm’s aperture diaphragm is a bit closed already at f/3.5, so even at its maximum aperture it starts to create sunstar artefacts around point light sources.

As this is a highly subjective topic may have a look at this article to see which kind of sunstars you prefer.

Bokeh

None of these 3 lenses is very fast, but at least they are close focusing, so when taking pictures up close or of smaller objects you can still generate a shallow depth of field.

The 28mm 3.5 creates a bit cleaner bokeh than the 32mm 2.8, but the latter obviously has the benefit of being a bit faster, so will also create a bit blur at longer focus distances.

At longer focus distances the combination of field curvature and optical vignetting surely leads to uneven bokeh, but the same is also true for many way more expensive compact lenses.

Even the 21mm 3.5 module shows decent bokeh, but of course only when taking pictures of very small objects.

Considering their tiny size – and the limitations that come with it – these lenses actually perform better in this category than I would have expected.

Chromatic aberrations

Lateral

Interestingly the 21mm and the 28mm hardly show any lateral CA whereas the 32mm shows a medium to high amount in the corners. As can be seen from the sample above this can be mostly fixed in a Raw converter like Lightroom with one click.

Longitudinal

21mm 3.5

28mm 3.5

32mm 2.8

These are not very fast lenses, but they all show a low to medium amount of bokeh fringing at their maximum aperture. The 32mm shows the higest amount, but it is also the fastest so that shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

When it comes to purple fringing the situation is similar. The 21mm needs to be stopped down to f/5.6 to get rid of this, for the other two it takes stopping down to f/8.0.

Conclusion

I think I have reviewed all the fullframe E-mount pancake lenses and all of them came with notable compromises: fixed aperture, subpar image quality, no filter thread, no AF, no MF – the list goes on and on.

This Samyang Remaster Slim set also comes with some compromises: changing the optical block is a rather fiddly task, the choice of focal lengths is a bit weird, the AF is on the noisy side and they make use of polycarbonate elements, where some questions regarding their longevity remain unanswered. 

However, there is also a lot to like here. Unlike most of the other pancake lenses these are real lenses with aperture diaphragm, autofocus, a normal filter thread and even an AF/MF switch – something even Samyang’s higher end lenses did not feature until recently.

Compared to the other pancake lenses I reviewed these are also among those that offer the best image quality. 

The 21mm 3.5 is the weakest of the three. For somewhat decent resolution it really needs f/8.0 to f/11 and I found it to have the most issues with veiling flare, limiting its usefulness for landscape shooting a bit.

The 28mm 3.5 is an interesting one. It is the one with the best performance at infinity and is almost free from distortion, yet it is the worst performer at close distances.

In terms of optical performance the 32mm 2.8 is a bit worse than the 28mm but better than the 21mm. As it is faster than the others and features the longest focal length of the trio it even allows for a bit of subject separation at medium distances (to a similar degree as a Fuji X100 series camera), making it an interesting companion to a slow zoom lens.

I think the initial price of 400 bucks was a bit too steep. If you can get this set for around 200 bucks – which is the price at some shops in Europe as I am writing this review – I think it can be a very interesting option. And I am personally thinking of keeping this set to have three different pancake options available that I can use to fill up gaps in my kit when travelling without weighing me down.

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Alternatives

I have reviewed many (maybe all) of the pancake lenses available for fullframe E-mount cameras. The best of them was the Viltrox AF 28mm 4.5 FE Pancake which also offers AF and a bit better performance as this Samyang 28mm 3.5 lens, but cannot be stopped down and cannot be focused manually. The others, AstrHori 18mm 8.0, Funleader 18mm 8.0 Cap Lens, Brightin Star 23mm 5.6, Brightin Star x Funleader 28mm 2.8 XSlim Pro all came with severe drawbacks and I find it hard to recommend any of these.

An exception is the Nikon Z 26mm 2.8 for Z-mount. It generally performs well, but that lens is also way more expensive and if you want to use it with filters you have to use its hood which will completely ruin its size advantage compared to the Nikon Z 28mm 2.8.

Sample images

You can find most of the sample pictures in full resolution here.

Further Reading

• All Lens Reviews
• Review: Samyang 10mm 3.5 XP
• Review: Samyang 24mm 1.8 AF
• Review: Samyang 85mm 1.2 XP
• Discuss this review with our Discord community

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BastianK

My name is Bastian and I am your expert here when it comes to ultra wide angle lenses, super fast portrait lenses (ranging from a 50mm f/0.95 to a 200mm f/1.8) and I also have reviewed way too many 35mm lenses. Don't ask me anything about macro or wildlife shooting though.

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