Bryan's New Photo Blog

Wanting to cut down on the number of lenses that I cart around, and having suffered the failure of my Sony 16-50 zoom, I decided to try the top of the (crop format) range Zeiss badged Sony 16-70 f4. This is not a cheap lens, I paid £605 but with a potential cashback from Sony. First the good news. It appears very well constructed, and is relatively small and light given the specification. The focus is very fast and accurate coupled with the Sony a6500 body, and the centre of the images produced is biting sharp.  The colour produced is pleasantly neutral, the photos look good. The not so good news. The edge performance is variable, I would say barely adequate to poor. The lenses I hoped to replace with this Zeiss included a Sigma 19mm f2.8 ( cost £100) and an ancient Pentax 28mm f2.8 M from film days - the copy used here cost me £25. These two optics are the weakest amongst those that I regularly use. So to the comparison. All tests using a tripod with a 2 sec delay and at f8....

Just to prove that it can be done, here's an example of the Canon EOS fit Sigma 100-300 f4, at 300mm, mounted using a Commlite adapter, on a Sony a6500 APS-C camera. The effective focal length is 450 mm, and the aperture used f10. The assembly was mounted upon a tripod. OK a particularly uninspiring subject, the view from our bedroom window, but that's not the point! The entire image (click for a larger image) An actual pixels crop from the extreme left side of the image. Given the distance involved and the atmospheric conditions I think that's pretty good, certainly usable.