Rokinon 20mm T1.9 Cine DS Lens for Sony E-Mount
High-Performance Wide-Angle Cine Prime
The Rokinon 20mm T1.9 Cine DS Lens for Sony E-Mount is a versatile, high-quality wide-angle prime lens crafted to meet the demanding standards of professional filmmaking and videography. As part of the well-regarded Cine DS series, this lens offers a compelling blend of superior optics, cinema-grade manual controls, and a fast aperture, delivering sharp, vibrant imagery optimized for full-frame Sony mirrorless cameras. Its expansive 94.8° field of view and bright T1.9 aperture combine to make it an essential tool for narrative storytelling, documentaries, commercials, and creative video projects requiring a dynamic wide perspective.
Expansive Wide-Angle Coverage
With a 20mm focal length on a full-frame Sony E-mount sensor, the Rokinon Cine DS offers an ultra-wide diagonal angle of view measuring approximately 94.8°. This expansive view is ideal for capturing vast landscapes, dramatic architecture, immersive interiors, and large environmental scenes where space and depth play critical narrative roles. The wide-angle perspective not only provides more visual information but also helps filmmakers emphasize scale, proximity, and relationships between elements in the frame.
The 20mm prime is especially useful for establishing shots and sequences where spatial dynamics impact the storytelling, giving a more enveloping feel to scenes that might otherwise feel limited with narrower focal lengths.
Bright T1.9 Aperture Enables Low-Light and Creative Depth
The lens features a fast, cinema-grade T1.9 aperture that allows tremendous creative and technical flexibility. The wide aperture creates a significant advantage in low-light or natural lighting conditions, enabling filmmakers to shoot with minimal artificial light without compromising image quality. The increased light intake helps maintain low ISO levels, reducing noise and enhancing clarity and color fidelity.
Additionally, although wide lenses traditionally have a deep depth of field, the T1.9 aperture offers meaningful depth-of-field control, enabling selective focus effects. This allows filmmakers to artistically isolate subjects and create beautiful foreground-background separation despite the broader visual context—a capability previously reserved for longer focal lengths.
The lens’s 11-blade rounded iris produces soft and pleasing bokeh, rendering out-of-focus highlights smoothly and contributing to the cinematic look desired in professional productions.
Superior Optics with Hybrid Aspherical Elements and Ultra Multi Coating (UMC)
To maximize optical performance, the 20mm Cine DS incorporates sophisticated hybrid aspherical elements designed to minimize chromatic aberrations, distortion, and spherical aberrations—a known challenge with ultra-wide lenses. Its optical formula is carefully balanced to deliver sharp, high-contrast images with excellent color accuracy across the entire frame, which is crucial for high-resolution video applications like 4K and 6K filming.
All lens elements are treated with proprietary Ultra Multi Coating (UMC), reducing lens flare and ghosting in scenes with strong contrast or backlighting. This coating technology preserves rich colors and contrast levels, ensuring consistent, vibrant imagery that meets cinematic standards.
Cinema-Grade Mechanical Design and Manual Control
The Rokinon 20mm T1.9 Cine DS lens features a traditional cinema lens design emphasizing manual control and rugged build quality. The focus and aperture rings are equipped with 0.8 MOD standard gears, ensuring compatibility with professional follow focus systems and iris motors. The standardized gear design makes lens swaps and rigging fast and easy across multiple lenses in a set, enhancing workflow efficiency.
The focus ring offers a smooth, well-damped operation with an extended rotation angle (approximately 200°), facilitating precise and repeatable focus pulls—a critical feature for narrative and commercial filmmaking that relies heavily on focus transitions.
The aperture ring is de-clicked, allowing silent, fluid adjustments without interrupting sound recordings or causing visual flicker during exposure changes.
Dual distance and T-stop scales, printed on both sides of the barrel with glow-in-the-dark paint, enable easy readability in low-light or blackout-controlled situations, helping camera assistants and operators perform quick, accurate adjustments.
Internal Focus and Practical Build
The lens employs internal focus technology, which keeps the physical lens length constant when changing focus. This improves balance on gimbals, handheld rigs, and matte box systems while reducing focus breathing for more professional visual consistency during focus shifts.
Constructed with a solid metal housing, the lens balances durability with ergonomic handling to perform well across handheld, gimbal, and tripod workflows. The front of the lens includes a 77mm filter thread, supporting ND filters, polarizers, and specialty glass to achieve various creative effects or exposure control.
Minimum Focusing Distance and Creative Flexibility
With a minimum focusing distance of approximately 0.24 meters (around 9.5 inches), the lens offers versatile close-up shooting possibilities that emphasize foreground subjects while maintaining the wide field of view—motivating creative environmental portraits and detailed close-ups within broad scenes.
Ideal Applications
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Narrative filmmaking where establishing wide shots and dramatic interiors dominate the visual language
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Documentaries and event filming that require flexible framing and reliable low-light performance
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Commercial and music video productions where distinct wide perspectives and bokeh-rich close-ups tell engaging stories
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Virtual production and gimbal shooting that demand compact, lightweight yet precise manual-focus lenses
Why MojoComputers?
MojoComputers is a trusted, authorized dealer of Rokinon Cine lenses, offering full manufacturer warranties and expert customer service. Their fast, insured shipping and competitive pricing in the United States make them a dependable source for filmmakers seeking authentic, cinema-grade optics.
Conclusion
The Rokinon 20mm T1.9 Cine DS Lens for Sony E-Mount delivers a perfect combination of ultra-wide coverage, bright cine aperture, advanced optics, and professional manual control. Its optical excellence and broad field of view make it an indispensable tool for filmmakers aiming to create visually dynamic and emotionally charged environments.
Offering consistent T-stop, color matching, and cinema-standard gears, this lens fits seamlessly into professional multi-lens setups while providing the versatility to tackle diverse cinematic challenges—from sweeping landscapes to intimate handheld shots.
For creatives using Sony E-mount cameras, this lens promises reliable performance, cinematic image quality, and the manual precision needed to realize ambitious visual storytelling.
