£120 portrait lens for Fuji GFX?
Can you put together a fast aperture medium format short portrait lens for under £160? Surprisingly, yes.
The Samyang 85mm f/1.4 has been available for a number of years in various guises, including modern AF variants for mirrorless cameras. The optics appear to be broadly similar across variants and generally very nice.
I have the latest AF version for my Sony, but a few years before I picked up a used manual focus version (the UMC version) also in Sony mount for about £120. The main feature is its fast aperture and lovely creamy bokeh and that it’s also quite sharp.
When I got the modern AF version, I didn’t want to throw away my old UMC version, so I explored converting it to GFX mount and using it on my Fuji GFX50s medium format camera.
Although the Sony mount unit can be removed quite simply by undoing 4 tiny screws, it doesn’t appear that the main body of the lens is that easy to DIY swap mounts. Fortunately, my B-i-L is handy with 3D printing and he made me a mount adapter ring that went between the main lens body and a metal GF mount I swiped off a no-long-used adaptor. We had to make a couple of prototypes to arrive at the right thickness to preserve infinity focus wide open, but it was straightforward trial and error and we got there easily enough. The final version mounts and locks and focuses to infinity.
So does it work?
Yes! It covers the larger 44x33mm frame corner to corner without hard vignetting even wide open. And it retains that lovely creamy bokeh. You are not going to find many f/1.4 lenses for the Fuji GFX, so this is worth considering, especially at the used price. Because the GFX sensor is larger than full frame, the 85mm behaves like roughly a 67mm lens in terms of angle of view, while the depth of field at f/1.4 is similar to about f/1.1 on full frame. That’s extremely thin depth of field wide open.
I’d recommend picking up a Nikon F or Canon EF version because dumb adaptors for these mounts to GFX are widely available. At the time of writing MPB UK has a number of lenses available in the red ring UMC, the gold ring ASPH, and even the Mk2 version for both F mount and EF mount. Prices from £112. Dumb adaptors like the K&F start from around £35.
It’s a budget lens, but decent optics and it covers, what’s not to like if you are trying to expand your medium format kit on a tight budget or if you just like exploring the world of adapted lenses.
