Wide Angle for Crop and FF?

[cliffwang]

Do you have any experience with Samyang 14mm?  Some reviews say this lens is good except for distortion.  Is that's possible to correct the distortion from lightroom?  By the way some people on Amazon report the lens will get dust easily, how is the build quality of this lens?

I haven't used the Samyang 14mm, only the 35mm.
The IQ is excellent, and the build quality is not us to zeiss/takumar standards, but it's good enough (mine was bought second-hand after a fall, the bits that broke were small bits of plastic, they'd survive normal use but not a fall). With the 35mm, dust could get inside the mechanism, but not between the elements, can't comment on the 14 in that respect.
With regards to the 14mm, from all reports it even beats the Canon L at some settings. But because of the barrel distortion (like 5% or so), resolution is really high in the centre. I'm sure you could de-barrel it, even manually (take a test shot of a brick wall or print a grid and save the numbers you use to get it square), then centre res would be a bit less. Still, at 1/4 the price of the L, it can't be beaten for the money...

Thanks for the information.  I think I might give the Samyang 14mm a try.  Since the lens will be used for landscape photos, AF is not really important for me.
A stupid question.  How can I de-barrel?

[dr croubie]

I've used PanoTools in the past, it's free and it's for Linux, which I use. It's available for windows using ptgui as far as I know.
I mostly use it as part of Hugin, the image stitching program, but i've used it directly as a UFRaw plugin, to de-barrel when raw-converting. To calibrate, I printed a spreadsheet from excel with the lines showing, so I got a bit of a printed grid. I took a photo of that, rawconverted in ufraw, and played around with the sliders until it looked rectilinear again. Then I wrote down the numbers, and every time I used that lens (efs15-85 @15mm), I typed the numbers back in to make it rectilinear.

I don't use it much anymore that way, because now i rawconvert in dpp. But i'm sure you could get a plugin for photoshop or lightroom. Or any number of other programs would all work in the same way...

[benherman]

Be patient save up, go FF and either 16-35 or 17-40. Save up.

[meli]

Hello,

Wondering if anyone knows of a wide angle lens that is compatible with both crop sensor and full frame cameras?

Shooting on a 60d now but anticipating upgrading in the next few years.  I am aware of the 16-35L but it's out of my price range.  Any other options out there?

Thanks!

Buy a used ef-s 10-22 for your 60D now. Sell it later when you ready for FF, get 16-35 or 17-40 for your FF.

second that,
you wont see what the 16-35 is about till you get an FF. Up till then you'll be shooting with the equivalent of 27mm, hell even your 24-70 will be wider than everything you shot with your 60d. In this sense i wouldn't recommend the 16-35. You would be much happier with a used 10-22 plus it'll keep its resale value. Another thing is that -for me at least- 10-22 is a much better lens in crop than the 16-35.

[koolman]

Samyang 14mm MF lens. At this FL the MF is not a problem.

The sharpness and IQ resembles zeiss.

Better on crop but FF compatible as well.

[preppyak]

Are you sure the resell value of 10-22mm is good?  I had posted my 6 months 10-22mm on CL for two weeks and asking for 650 in bay area.  No one offered more than 600 for it.  In the last, I had to compromise the price 600 USD.  6 month lens for only about 75% resell value.

Well, there are multiple mistakes here. One, using Craigslist and being surprised that people low-balled you. If you're selling expensive photo equipment, go to a photography forum to sell it. You'd have probably gotten $650 pretty quickly from FredMiranda or POTN. This also makes the point, buy the 10-22 used from someone in mint condition, you'll save some money (say 10% off retail), and when you resell it, you'll have not lost that initial retail price.

Every lens, no matter what, is gonna lose 5-10% when its no longer brand new in the box. Only if the demand gets really high (24-70 for example) will a used lens sell higher than new. But, if the trade off of spending the extra $100 in this case is that you get a useful focal length for 2 years before upgrading, it's well worth the money

[MarkIII]

Have you considered saving your money and just renting the lens as you need it? Instead of spending money only to have to resell it soon. It may be a little annoying not having it on you 24/7 but if you are thinking of upgrading soon anyways it may save you money.

[87vr6]

No one has really mentioned the 8-15L.... Works on both, and if you get DxO software, or are good with photoshop, you turn the the fisheye images into rectilinear images fairly easily with good results...

Don't laugh, I'm just using this page and images as reference...

http://www.kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/15mm-fisheye.htm#dist

[The Bad Duck]

Sigma 12-24 or samyang 14. I have the samyang on my wishlist.