SAMYANG RF 85 – not good enough

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Second part of my adventure with my Samyang lens. I bought a lens station and updated the firmware to the latest version (v2) but still no major improvements: between 1/2 and 1/3 of my shots remain out of focus: slightly at best, quite substantially in the worst cases.

I even went to my favourite camera shop in Tokyo to compare it with the Canon RF 85mm f/1.2L and the results were obvious: the Canon nailed the focus every single time while the Samyang did not (single center point AF used for all shots). As you can see below, the first one is slightly front focused, the 2nd one slightly back focused and the last one, well, the Samyang just missed it.

Given the price tag, I was ready to accept less sharpness than the Canon, could forgive the lack of IBIS support but unreliable AF? I don’t think anyone would as this makes this lens unusable at wide aperture (which is the reason why I got this lens in the first place), so I returned it.