Category: Lenses and Optics
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Sony FE 16-35 f/4 & Sony FE 24-70mm f/4 Zoom MTF and Variance
Many of you who have followed along as we beta-test our Sony FE lens testing have been asking where the FE 16-35mm f/4 ZA OSS and the FE 24-70mm f/4 ZA OSS test results are. Well, the answer is they are here. But your other question, why has it taken so long, has a more complex answer. Testing FE…
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A Look at the New Sigma MC-11 Lens Adapter
We’ve recently received the Sigma MC-11 Sony E to Canon EF mount adapter which promises full autofocus functionality for 15 Sigma Art Lenses on Sony E-mount cameras. What the Sigma MC-11 brings to the table is the ability to use face detection, eye recognition, and the use of continuous phase…
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Sony FE 50mm f/1.8 MTF and Consistency
Sony has cranked out a bunch of new lenses lately, and one of their latest got my attention: the FE 50mm f/1.8. It did so for a couple of reasons. First, I wasn’t expecting it, since they already have the really good FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA lens in their lineup. Second, I’ll admit I expected them to…
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A Look at Electromagnetic Focusing
If you’re like me you like to know what’s going on inside your camera or lens to some degree. They are tools, and if I want to get the best use out of my tool I need to know it’s strengths and weaknesses. You may not have noticed, especially if you shoot just Canon or Nikon, but there’s been a…
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Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 GMaster Emergency Tear Down
OK, I usually don’t respond to requests to disassemble things. I have a day job and the blog stuff is my hobby. But every so often the Bat Signal get’s raised over Gotham Internet and Aaron and I feel the need to fight the crime of massive overreaction and stomp out the flames of…
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Sony FE 85mm f/1.4 G Master Lens MTF and Variance
We are pretty excited about the new Sony G Master Lenses for FE mount cameras. Our excitement may be a little different than yours because we see the Sony FE lenses as an evolving new product. There were some things we really liked and some things we really didn’t like about the first FE mount…
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Sony Goes World Class: The 24-70mm f/2.8 GM MTF and Variance Tests
I was one of those who noted Sony had some troubles, as manufacturers often do, with some of their first generation lenses for full-frame FE mount cameras. When they announced the G Master lens series I was really excited to test them. I was expecting Sony to have made progress both with optical…
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Just the Lenses: The 70-200mm f/4 Comparison
There is a very good reason that we haven’t gotten around to testing one of the most commonly used zoom lenses until just now. We forgot. I was testing the Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS lens because we had just torn one down, I was impressed by the construction, and I wanted to see if the copy-to-copy…
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LensRentals Tears Down the Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2 Lens
LensRentals hasn’t been able to get enough copies of the Zeiss Batis lenses to even fill our existing orders, much less enough for Aaron and I to test and play with them. But one of our customers was kind enough to drop a Zeiss Batis 25mm f/2 lens the other day. Nothing looked smashed, but after…
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Mythbusting: Parfocal Photo Zooms
About twice a week I get a call from a photo-videographer wanting to know which photo zoom lenses in a certain focal length are parfocal (stays in focus while changing focal lengths). It’s understandable why they would ask; a superb photo zoom is 1/10th the cost of a good video zoom. They get…
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The Long-Awaited, Scary and Amazing Fuji Lens Teardown
For, oh, about 2 years now, every time we do a lens teardown I get emails from Fuji shooters asking me to tear down one of their lenses. There are several reasons we haven’t. For one thing, we have far fewer copies of those lenses so there is less reason to work on them. Since we can’t get parts…
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A Peek Inside the Leica Vario-Elmarit-SL 24-90mm f/2.8-4 ASPH
We always get excited when a lens comes out with some new technology or major changes. This time, the new technology came from an unexpected source when Leica released the Vario-Elmarit-SL 24-90mm f/2.8-4 ASPH lens. I know most of you don’t think of Leica as technological groundbreakers and most of…