Experiences with the Samyang Lens Station

If you have a Samyang lens for your camera you may find that the lens stops working after a camera firmware update. That’s what happened to me when I updated my A7RV to the version 4.0 firmware.

I do a lot of street photography with the Samyang 24mm f/2.8 and I noticed I was missing lots of shots. Photos that should have been easy, with a clear subject and face visible for the camera to focus on were entirely out of focus. It seemed to happen more often when I was shooting from the hip, and then it seemed the camera wouldn’t take a photo at all.

I thought it might be some auto focus setting on my camera. I played around with settings attempting to fix it, but nothing worked.

Eventually, I figured out it was the camera firmware update. Sony’s new firmware changed something in how the auto focus information is transmitted from lens to camera. My Sony lenses worked fine but not the Samyang ones. There had been Samyang firmware updates in January for the A7M5. My camera firmware came out in December but I hadn’t updated it until about a month ago.

I bought the Samyang Lens Station. The Amazon websites around Europe didn’t have it in stock, but amazon.ie did, shipped from Spain. It was only after that I remembered to check MPB and found it there at a much cheaper price. I guess these things don’t have much use once your lens is working ok again.

You’ll need to download the Lens Manager app. The interface is simple, and updating the lens is easy enough, if not obvious. Once you seat the lens on the lens station you’ll see a screen like this:

The “Download Link” goes to a website that doesn’t load but you can grab the firmware files from here, their current site. A .hex file is extracted from the downloaded zip file and that’s the “Lens F/W File” that you load. Click “Update” and the lens will be updated in about 60 seconds or so.

The 24mm lens went from version 5 to version 9, my 75mm f/1.8 lens went from version 1 to version 7.

Once I’d updated I tried out the lenses and all was good again. Yay!

I want to explore the AF/MF settings in the programme too and see what that’ll do but my priority was getting the lens working.

Do I love the Samyang 24mm f/2.8? Why yes. I have 33,409 images shot with it. Most of those are probably rubbish as it’s my street photography lens of choice but it’s worked really well until now. You can see a selection of my best photos here.

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