New Glass, what’s up?
Well things aren’t so bad, but they aren’t great either. With Sony’s Alpha actually taking off, and now firmly in third spot to Nikon and Canon’s 1-2 spot (as tiny as Sony’s share is) third parties like Tamron and Sigma have finally started to step up offering a decent line-up for Alpha owners. Sony of course is all too happy to offer you a lens, but at a premium price. Worse yet, their entry level glass is going for that premium price. Anything that resembles a pro level lens will cost the proverbial arm and leg.
Examples: Their 24-105mm lens while a pleasing range, receiving nothing more than average praise from real owners fetches almost 5 bills. It’s nothing special in its sharpness, and it’s actually quite slow. Their new “G” 70-300mm is G in name only. To these eyes, it looks like a good all around Minolta zoom given an update with a G slapped on it. It will run you 8 bills, and the early samples look very much like what an old Minolta running one third the cost could deliver. Anything Sony offers that's under $350 seems to perform poorly to these eyes.
Even worse is the Zeiss line. The first zoom launched was the 16-80mm f3.5/4. At debut Sony wanted about 8 hundred, in the present it’s about $699. Quality control was too loose on this one, so much so, that in forums, this lens and quality control came up quite a bit. A good copy yielded great contrast, sharpness and colors that popped. At times, the color and contrast were like those of a lens with a circular polarizer attached to it. So what was the problem? Two, one minor, one major. The minor issue was image shift when zooming in and out. I consider this minor because it was an annoyance that never affected picture quality to my knowledge.
The major issue was image softness or should I say out of focus pictures. I’m a former owner of this lens for this very reason. Mated to my first dSLR an alpha A100, I attributed many of my soft and out of focus pics to user error. But after the months passed, and I came to grips with my A100 I started to doubt the lens. I started to poke around, and many others were complaining.
So what was the problem? This lens caused my 100 to back focus a lot, like all of the time. Worse yet was its mis focus problem. This lens also had the knack of making sure that nothing was in focus. When I purchased my A700, things weren’t any better and I knew it was the glass. The only way I can describe this problem is like this: imagine a lens that has a razor thin DOF even at f5 to f7.1. Strange yes, but that’s the closest description I can give. When it nailed a shot, it was better than my 50mm prime. Better yet the colors and contrast made it pop. Too bad though
Next up we have (at this writing) three more fine Carl Zeiss lenses that will cost you big time. The limited range (but speedy) Zeiss 24-70mm f2.8 will set you back $1,750. I don’t recall Zeiss ever claiming the lens is sealed against water or dust intrusion. I imagine this lens collecting dust, not because it’s bad, but it’s just too steep price wise. Also available, two Zeiss primes, the 85mm f1.4 about $1,300 and the 135mm f1.8 about $1,800. Where is the budget 85mm f1.4? Sony’s true pro glass starts at two thousand dollars (70-200mm f2.8) and only goes way up from there. Where is the thrifty fifty? I don’t see one. The only 50mm Sony offers is an f1.4 that runs $349. Not terribly expensive, but there should be a simple $125 dollar option for the beginner, for the Alpha A100/A200 user that happens to be a more casual shooter.
When it comes to glass things are getting better, but Sony has a long way to go to catch up to Nikon and Canon in this regard. They’ve only been in the dSLR business about 2.5 years, only a tiny fraction of the time that Nikon and Canon has had. So for now they’ve got an excuse. They need to kick up their game. They are about to drop their flagship camera body, and I imagine in the near future they will bring a true, pro body, with a built in VG by 2010 if not sometime in 2009, that's the camera body I'm really thinking about. The flagship for 2008, uh, not so much. Yeah it's full frame, yeah it's got 24 megapixels, blah, blah, that's for another post.
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