I spent a day with this lens and came back quite impressed. It’s not perfect, so let’s get the downers out of the way: Like for most wide zooms on full frame cameras, there’s some noticeable corner softness, and there’s also a bit more chromatic aberration than I see on Canon and Nikon’s pro level wide zooms. It’s easily corrected in Photoshop, but I would suggest shooting images in raw, so you can get the very best correction.

With those two minor notations out of the way, I have nothing left but the positives: It’s sharp throughout the zoom range, very nice colors and contrast, autofocuses with the quickness of a rattlesnake and the persistence of a bulldog. Overall, a world-class wide angle zoom, the best in Sony’s lineup.