Once upon a time, film SLRs were sold with fixed focal length lenses, usually 50mm (which equates roughly to the normal human field of vision) and with a maximum aperture of f1.7 or f2.

You didn’t get the flexibility of a zoom, but you didn’t get the barrel distortion or chromatic aberration we now have to put up with either. Zooms have, however, taken over to the extent that prime lenses have all but disappeared. There are signs of a tiny resurgence, though, and Samsung’s D-Xenogon 35mm f2 is an example of this.

On a 35mm film camera, a 35mm lens would be a moderate wide-angle. Fitted to a digital SLR with an APS-C sized sensor, though, it equates to a 53.5mm – close to the old standard lens on film cameras. And the f2 maximum aperture is a stop and a half faster than the f3.5 of a kit zoom.

Note that although the ‘D’ prefix suggests this is a digital lens, it’s identical to the Pentax 35mm f2, which fits film cameras too. We tried it on a Pentax ist film camera body and there was no sign of corner shading. This may go some way towards explaining the price: £300 would be about right for a full-frame 35mm f2. Of course, it’s going to seem a bit steep to a DSLR owner whose kit lens probably cost a fraction of that.

The viewfinder image is brighter with this lens, but not dramatically so. The focusing isn’t especially quiet, though it’s quite quick most of the time. The manual focusing movement is very smooth and there’s a distance scale behind a transparent window in the lens barrel, together with depth-of-field markings. These are index marks either side of the central line marking the focus point. They indicate the nearest and furthest limits of depth of field at any given aperture and focus distance, and there are sets of marks on this lens for f8, f16 and f22.

For example, let’s say you manually set the focus to 2m. The markings show that at f16, even infinitely distant objects will also be sharp, as will objects nearer to the camera down to a distance of just over 1m. Depth-of-field control is a bit of a lost art now that zoom lenses have taken over, but with a fixed focal length lens like this one you get the chance to be much more creative.

Indeed, this is a lens that forces you to slow down a little. Not because it’s slow in operation, but because you can’t take the easy option and just zoom in or out to fill the frame. Instead, you have to go up to your subject and walk around it to explore the angles.

The only disappointing thing about this lens is that it’s no sharper than the standard kit zoom, though it’s impressively consistent and delivers crisp images even at maximum aperture. Sharpness isn’t everything, either. The extra stop-and-a-half of speed is very useful, as is the almost total freedom from aberrations.

A nice lens for those who want to shoot in low light or rediscover a more considered approach that we seem to have lost in the switch to zoom lenses.

Final Verdict The large max aperture and minimal aberrations make this a high-quality lens, though the 18-55m kit lens is just as sharp OVERALL

Our lens reviewer, and technical expert, Rod is a veritable photographic encyclopaedia. His illustrious CV has seen him write for many mags, websites and journals.