Samyang Remaster Slim is an interchangeable lens …lens

When I saw this, I heard Xzibit in my head yelling, “Hey, dawg, we heard you liked interchangeable lenses” in my head. It’s an interchangeable lens for your mirrorless camera with its own interchangeable optics. And no, it’s not April 1st.

It’s called the Samyang Remaster Slim, and the main lens body itself is quite small. Samyang says it’s as thin as a body cap, although I think it’s probably a little thicker than that. As to why they called it “Remaster”, Samyang posted an amended dictionary definition…

Remaster Slim – Old-school Lenses with New-school Tech?

What Samyang appears to have done with the Remaster Slim is recreate some common old lenses found in 35mm point & shoot cameras. Then they’ve taken those lenses and updated them to work with a modern mirrorless autofocus system.

Except, they haven’t done each lens individually. They’ve essentially made a sort of lens housing that acts as an adapter between the camera’s lens mount and the actual interchangeable optics modules. In this case, the camera’s lens mount appears to be Sony E mount.

There are three modules at 21mm f/3.5, 28mm f/3.5 and 32mm f/2.8 focal lengths, each providing a different field of view. All of them, however, are going to be quite wide on a full-frame camera. But they should give a similar sort of feel to some of those old school point & shoot film cameras.

“Modern Technology with a Classic Charm”

It’s an interesting take on something that’s actually become a bit of a DIY trend. A lot of people have been modifying camera body caps by adding the lens from disposable 35mm cameras. You can even buy them pre-assembled if you don’t want to make your own.

But what’s even more interesting, I think, it’s that this lens came from Samyang. I mean, it’s the sort of lens we’d typically see from a company like Lensbaby or Lomography. Could Samyang be stepping up to compete with those companies on lo-fi lenses for modern cameras?

That would be interesting to see. I expect Samyang could make some very weird and wonderful “artistic” lenses if they wanted to.

Only available in Korea (for now?)

This is normally where we tell you how much it costs and when it starts shipping. But there’s bad news for most of us on this one. At the moment, it’s only available for pre-order in Korea for a price that equates to around $220. There’s no word as of yet when it might come to the rest of the world.

There’s also no mention of lens mounts other than the Sony E mount. It would be nice to see this come to Nikon Z, Canon RF, Leica L, Fuji X and even Micro Four Thirds, but I probably wouldn’t get your hopes up for it happening any time soon.

[via Sony Alpha Rumors]