Introduction

In 2023 Samyang introduced a new line of Cine lenses called “V-AF”. Mid 2026 this lineup consists of 6 lenses, 4 of which are rehoused photography lenses. The 20mm T1.9 and this 100mm T2.3 are new designs though. At first sight there do not seem to be any disadvantages to using these lenses for photography – actually their casings look and feel much nicer than Samyang’s other lenses – and there are not a lot of alternatives with similar specifications available, so I decided to have a closer look at this Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF.

Sample Images

Most of the sample images in this review can be found in full resolution here.

Specifications

The Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF has the following specifications:

• • Diameter: 72 mm
  • Length: 85 mm
  • Weight: 282g (without hood, without caps)
  • Field of view: 25.4° (diagonally)
  • Filter Diameter: 58 mm
  • Number of Aperture Blades: 9 (rounded)
  • Elements/Groups: 9/8 (?)
  • Close Focusing Distance: 0.7 m
  • Maximum Magnification: 1:5.7 (measured)
  • Mount: Sony E

As is typical for a Cine lens, the T-Stop instead of the f/Stop is given. As the cameras work with f/Stops, they recognize it as an f/2.2 lens. Throughout this review I will use f/Stops as usual.

buy from amazon.com | amazon.de | B&H | ebay.com | ebay.de (advertisement/affiliate links) for $699 

Handling/Build quality

The mechanical design from these “V-AF” lenses differs from those of Samyang’s other lenses. The outer casing seems to ne made from a mix of polycabonate and metal parts.

The focus ring has a nice damping – actually similar to a manual focus lens – and a linear coupling. No matter how fast you turn the focus ring it always takes 300° from the minimum focus distance (0.7 m) to infinity.
When you turn your camera off the lens will remember the last focus position and will still be there when you turn the camera on again.

The lens features a switch which can be programmed with a Samyang lens station and a focus hold button. Out of the box when flipping the switch the focus ring will work as aperture ring.

At the front this lens features a bayonet, electronic contacts and even an LED. Samyang offers two accessories that can be mounted here: a geared manual focus adapter and a front anamorphic adapter. For photography purposes I do not see a lot of use for these and I didn’t try either of them myself.  

With the Samyang lens station a few settings can be changed: the switch can be turned into a more useful AF/MF switch, the direction of rotation of the focus ring can be switched as well as the color of the LEDs (I didn’t really find out what those are actually useful for though).

This Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF is a fairly compact lens. It has a similar diameter as the Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo and is only slightly longer. It does not feature an aperture ring though.

AF performance

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 very fast and for normal use cases – especially portraiture – it certainly worked well.

This is also true when using this lens via the megadap ETZ21pro adapter on a Nikon Z-mount camera.

Vignetting

light falloff

Most of the lenses with similar specifications we reviewed showed around 2 EV vignetting at their maximum aperture and this Samyang is actually one of the slightly better ones with 1.7 EV. For comparsion: the Viltrox 85mm 2.0 Evo showed 2.4 EV here. 

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. 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 optical vignetting is average for a lens with these parameters – and clearly better than what we saw from the similarly sized Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo.

When it comes to the mechanical design, there is sadly often something wrong with the Samyang lenses though and that is again the case here. As we can see, stopping down from f/2.2 to f/2.8 has barely any effect. Looking at the f/4.0 series we also see that the diaphragm does not close symmetrically – still a common issue with Samyang’s lenses. 

f/2.2 <————> f/2.8 <————> f/4.0

Now the question was: is the f/2.2 opening the realistic one or the f/2.8 one? I compared it to the Sigma 105mm 1.4 DG HSM Art with a fixed focus distance ensured by a test target and we can see that the f/2.8 stop is clearly the “odd one out” here. This obviously means the aperture does not close in a linear way as you would expect (especially from a Cine lens). 

You may wonder if this is just sample variation, but I had a look at other reviews of this lens and even though none of them mentions this, you can clearly see it in their sample pictures, too.

You may also wonder if this only happens at closer distances, but this is not the case: also at infinity there is hardly a difference in light gathering capabilities and amount of optical aberrations (see e.g. Coma section) between f/2.2 and f/2.8.

In some of the other categories I decided to use f/3.2 instead of f/2.8 (as I usually would) as that seems to be much closer to an actual f/2.8 opening.

Sharpness

Focus Shift

This Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF does show a low amount of focus shift but luckily not enough for the subject to drop out of the focal plane. We can also see that this lens is not overly well corrected for shooting at close distances as we see a lot of color aberrations here.

infinity (42mp Sony A7rII)

In the center this Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF shows a good performance from f/2.2. The midframe looks only slightly worse whereas the corners lack some resolution and details at wider apertures. Peak across frame performance is reached around f/11. If you are looking for a lens that shows a flat field and great performance already at wider apertures you might not be perfectly happy with this one.

Here the Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo showed a better performance, as it already looked very good across frame when stopped down to f/4.0.

portrait distance (2.4 m, 42mp Sony A7rII)

For portraiture it isn’t so important how flat the field is, it is more interesting to see what the sharpness is like when focused at different parts of the frame to take field curvature out of the equation.

This is what I did here, I refocused for every shot and aperture to get the best possible result at different locations in the frame (center, inner midframe and outer midframe).
Focus distance was roughly 2.4 m and the circle of the dollar bill is more or less the size of a human eye.

f/2.2 <————> f/3.2

At portrait distances the performance is really impressive though. Already at its maximum aperture this lens’ image quality is really good across frame. In the outer midframe some lenses did show more Moiré in the outer midframe are in my tests (e.g. the Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo and Sony FE 85mm 1.4 GM II), but these are hardly field relevant differences.

close (0.7 m, 1:5.7, 42mp Sony A7rII)

A benefit of this Samyang 100mm lens is that it offers a better magnification than the 85mm f/1.8 to f/2.0 lenses. Whereas those lenses usually offer a maximum magnification between 1:7.5 to 1:8.0, this lens offers 1:5.7.

However, its performance also does leave something to be desired at wider apertures. It needs to be stopped down to f/5.6 for really crisp results whereas lenses like the Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo or the Sony FE 85mm 1.4 GM II can manage that already at their maximum aperture.

I know many people are not overly happy with the mediocre maximum magnification values of the fast 85mm lenses, so for those this might be an acceptable compromise.

Flare resistance

As always evaluating flare is a complex matter since you can get any lens to look bad if you push it hard enough and a slight change of scenario can affect results a lot.

With short fast tele lenses ghosting usually is not much of a problem, but veiling flare can be, so where does this Samyang 100mm T2.3 stand?

The performance at the maximum aperture is actually not bad: no issues with ghosting and veiling flare is only an issue at specific angles with the strong light source outside the frame.

Stopped down we can see some smaller artefacts but veiling flare hardly is an issue. There is only one rather specific position where we can create a big flare which can easily be avoided.

A good performance for a fast tele lens in this category.

Coma

Samyang usually corrects Coma well and also here we don’t see distracting artefacts in the corners. As we have already seen in the sharpness infinity section, the corners generally don’t look great at wider apertures though, so – as we have seen before – it takes stopping down to f/5.6 for the corners to look decent. 

Distortion

When I reviewed this lens it was announced that Lightroom will include profiles for the V-AF lenses but they still weren’t available. The distortion is low and mostly uniform though, so not a big deal. Dialing in -3 in Lightroom or Photoshop corrects it well.

Bokeh

A 100mm lens with a maximum aperture of f/2.2 is not record breaking – after all you can find 105mm f/1.4 lenses like the Sigma 105mm 1.4 DG HSM Art or the Nikon AF-S 105mm 1.4E on the market, which are 4/3rds of a stop faster. However, this Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF is also a more compact (and more affordable) lens and one could argue that a maximum aperture of f/2.2 is surely enough for most applications. Let’s have a closer look!

Close distance

Most lenses render an unobtrusive bokeh at closer distances and generally that is also the case here. As can be seen in the last sample above, this lens is prone to creating double edged structures towards the edges, which can look distracting.

Mid distance

At mid distances this Samyang 100mm T2.3 reminds me a lot of the recently reviewed Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo: when the background is very structured things get busier. This is true for many of the highly corrected modern lenses and something you will also see with e.g. the Voigtländer Apo-Lanthar lenses.

Long distance

Also at longer focus distances we can see this lens having a slight tendency towards creating double edged structres with structured background. 

For typical portrait applications – especially those where you can choose your background – there really isn’t anything to complain about here though.

This is a lens that will appeal more to those that a prefer a structured bokeh than those looking for perfectly smoothened out backgrounds.

Sunstars

I already told you that the aperture diaphragm leaves something to be desired and that can easily be seen here again: the sunstars look messy with rays of uneven length. A rather typical performance for a Samyang lens, where this does not seem to be a priority. 

If you want to learn more about this topic have a look at this article.

Chromatic aberration

lateral

Now this was a bit interesting. Most modern lenses with electronic contacts already contain correction data for lateral CA and also here Lightroom says that an embedded profile has been applied. However, there are still rather unsightly lateral CA visible. They can still be easily corrected in a good raw converter by one click as I did here.

longitudinal

• background f/2.2
• f/4.0
• foreground f/2.2
• f/4.0

• 
• 
• 
• 

Sony A7rII | Samyang 100mm T2.3 V-AF | 50% crops

While this 100mm T2.3 lens has some issues with the color correction at closer distances, the same cannot be said about longer focus distances: here there is hardly any bokeh fringing to be found, a very good performance.

Also purple fringing does not exist.

Pictures like the one above would blatantly show any issues with purple fringing, but the dark subject against the blown out background is well defined without any purple fringing.

Conclusion

good very good contrast and resolution at portrait distances CA correction Coma correction (but mediocre corner sharpness) bokeh (close to mid distances) flare resistance (barely) low distortion build quality/handling fast and silent AF size/weight

average vignetting

not good janky aperture diaphragm performance at close distances at wider apertures

These Samyang V-AF lenses are surely interesting devices. I prefer their general build quality over those of other Samyang lenses and especially the focus ring is surprisingly nice.

For typical applications the optical performance is also very good and it reminded me a lot of the Viltrox AF 85mm 2.0 Evo. At close distances the performance leaves a bit to be desired at wider apertures, but then this lens also focuses closer than most of the 85mm lenses, so I cannot really fault it for that.

What spoils the picture is the janky aperture diaphragm. There is hardly a difference between f/2.2 and f/2.8 and I wonder if this is actually a bigger problem for Cine applications. 

If you can overlook that – and especially if you prefer 100mm over 85mm – this can be a very interesting short tele, even for purely photographic usage.

buy from amazon.com | amazon.de | B&H | ebay.com | ebay.de (advertisement/affiliate links) for $699 

One final note on the price: for $699 this is not a cheap lens compared to the alternatives, but it seems this lens can often be found for a lot less during various promotions, so it might be worth it to wait for the next Cyber Monday, Single’s Day, Black Friday or whatever comes to mind next.

Sample Images

Most of the sample images in this review can be found in full resolution here.

Further Reading

• Guide to 85-135mm portrait lenses for Sony FE cameras
• Review: Samyang AF 18mm 2.8 FE
• Review: Samyang AF 24mm 1.8 FE
• Review: Samyang 50mm 1.2 XP
• Review: Samyang AF 135mm 1.8 FE

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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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