Wow! We heard the buzz about the Rokinon fisheyes, but we weren’t expecting them to be quite this good. Even shot wide open at T3.8, you get extremely good corner sharpness for a fisheye. Now, it’s still a fisheye, so the distortion does affect corner sharpness and clarity to a degree. However, when a flat plane of focus is pretty sharp from center to corners on a fisheye, that’s pretty damn good!

Visually, distortion seems a tad less “fishy” than other 8mm fisheyes, with the image area filling the frame on APS-C cameras. While it physically mounts to full-frame cameras, the built-in hood makes a wavy vignette around the entire image, so we wouldn’t suggest it for that use. Basically, if you’re shooting video, and you need a fisheye, you should have no hesitations with this lens whatsoever. Still shooters, same story. Lenses four times its price don’t quite offer what it does.