Have wanted a fisheye lens for a while. They're generally pretty expensive. I already had the Rokinon 85mm f1.4 and liked it so when I saw they were coming out with a new, version II, of their fisheye lens, decided to look into it. There are no reviews of it that I can find on the web. Ordered it in and took it out the other night for a bit of a test run. This is the Nikon variant and it has the AE chip that is available on many Rokinon lenses for setting the aperture automatically on the camera rather than the lens.
It's small and lightweight. The focus ring is nicely damped and very smooth. Build quality is very good, it feels very solid. Non-rotating front element (but there's no way to attach filters anyway), internal focus. From the test shots I did, image quality seems quite good. Some colours, particularly in the red family, seem to be very saturated but I'll need to play with it some more to see if that's a characteristic of the lens or just something that happened this one time. There is a shot where CA would rear its ugly head if it were a problem. It doesn't seem that it is. There is some purple fringing but I had to zoom in to 100% or more to see it and it cleaned up quite nicely in Lightroom 4.
The purple fringing shots are in the next post.
Overall, for a little under $300 I'm pretty pleased.
