And now it’s official: The new Samyang Cine lens line “XEEN” has been announced. And full specs and preorder are available at BHphoto:
Rokinon Xeen 24mm T1.5 Lens (Click here).
Rokinon Xeen 50mm T1.5 Lens (Click here).
Rokinon Xeen 85mm T1.5 Lens (Click here).
There is also a first impression review at BH Explora (Click here):
I found the Rokinon XEEN Cine Lenses to be well made, easy to work with, and overall I enjoyed the image quality. They rendered naturalistic images with good contrast and a pleasing, slightly warm feel. Intercutting between the lenses required no additional color correction beyond applying the same LUT to the footage. It is my preference to shoot more closed down than wide open, and I did feel the lenses performed best starting around T4, but I was still satisfied with footage shot at T1.5. Overall, I was pleased with the XEEN lenses and look forward to working with them again.
12 Responses
Samyang? More like Sam-ching!$$
Same optical design though 🙁
Are you sure? Samyang already has a cine version of the current 85mm lens.
Yes, sure. All housing and aperture blades.
And the glass? If so the price is ridicules.
Allright, we are all clearly missing something here. Would someone who understands this cine matter be kind to explain to us noobs, why the same optics now cost 10 freakin times more?
Economies of scale is #1 reason. Aside from that, there are several technical reasons that command more expensive labor to build these sets including:
– tighter tolerances in some cases, especially around very precise focusing mechanisms
– reduced or eliminated focus breathing
– parforcal benefits on zooms
– color matching within a set
– typically same physical size across different FLs for quick swaps on rig-dependent setups (matt boxes, follow focus, etc.)
– typically much heavier duty overall construction to withstand demanding environments of a movie shoot
But, again, the shier volume (or rather, lack of thereof) compared to your typical stills lenses and the fact that these are usually used on large production sets (read: bigger budget than you run of the mill photographer) is what really commands high prices.
On a related note… I’m a hobbyist, and so far had to settle for the FE 28-135 F4, which is ridiculously cheap compared to the cine primes and of course to the cine zooms, yet absolutely delivers on the QA and practicality fronts. For my needs it suffices more than plenty. It’s a hidden jewel in the FE glass lineup. If you are serious about dipping your feet in advanced video, definitely give it a shot!
About parfocal and focus breathing:
Imagine you are using an autofocus-powerzoom lens in manual mode, both topics can be addressed to the internal computer-chip. If you zoom a bit, the chip does according focus adjustment and vice versa.
I am not sure how much autofocus-lenses are used in professional movie productions, but I am quite sure there are use-cases they are better than the manual counterparts. My best example is this dramatic cinema-effect, having a portait of person, then the camera is is changing the distance to the person and adjusting at the same time the focal length to have the person always in the same size on the screen, but changing background. In total 3 simultaneously tasks for the camera operator:
– moving camera
– changing zoom
– chainging focus
I have seen this effect times and times at TV-series “Heroes”, but very often I saw a misaligned focus during this sequence. I bet an autofocus system would have done better – and would have made work easier…
I think at some point AF algorithm will work as reliable as a focus puller, at least in controlled environments.
But for primes you still need to be able to focus without breathing.
It’s called dolly zoom, and requires well controlled zoom, focus and dolly speed to be perfect. In my experience AF is very rare in (higher end) video productions, and maybe becoming a little bit more common in ENG and documentary work. There are several reasons for this, the main reason being unreliability. You don’t want to rig a set and have numerous actors performing in front of you and leave such a crucial part as focus to automation, unless it is a highly refined pre-programmed motorized focus/zoom system on motorized heads, sometimes used when CGI is to be merged into the image at a later point. If you ever worked with a Director or DOP, you would know that they almost always are absolute control freaks, never leaving one single thing to chance, and AF in their eyes is nothing but one giant gamble.
AF does become better and better by each generation, but I doubt a lot of Hollywood productions ever will use it, unless for very particular scenes and circumstances.
I can see a future development where a focus puller uses a high resolution touch screen and maybe a speed wheel. That way he could just touch the part that should be in focus and use the speed wheel to throttle the focus movement. But this would still be a manual focus, with the aid of AF tech.
Guys ,i dont think these lenses are the same optical design.. i think these are purpose built design with no focus breathing(very important for cine lens)
I wish they did same effort when they build catadrioptic lenses….. I would prefer a great quality image for astrophotography ( when you don t want to buy a large telescope) than pricey lens only few ppl ( the one which can’t afford Zeiss one) will buy for video shooting