hello everyone, today I want to talk about this sony 10-18mm lens.
I bought it used in May 2019, I think it's very essential focal range to add to the kit, 10-18mm is fullframe equivalent of 15-27mm, covers a nice range of ultra wide angle that can be so helpful when you are shooting in narrow space. It perfectly complements the popular Tamron 28-75mm lens, it's a perfect lens for selfie and vlogging as well.
The lens itself is impressively tiny comparing to fullframe lenses, it's also slightly smaller and lighter than its canon counter part, which makes it easy to carry around, ideal for run and gun shooting.
Build quality is good, not as good as lenses such as Tamron 28-75mm or sigma e mount prime series, but it's good and solid in its own way. Zoom ring and focus rings are solid metal which I don't like, because they grind my fingernails and makes me cringe.
At 18mm the lens is at its shortest, when you zoom out to 10mm which is very often you use this lens for, the barral sticks out a bit, which makes it longer, but you won't see the difference if you have lens hood on.
The lens has OSS, optical steady shot, which is super helpful when shooting handheld, people like me using a6300 instead of a6500 will benefit a lot from it, I'm glad that they put that in there. F4 max aperture on APS-C sensor is not as impressive as an F4 in fullframe's terms, but it's definitely better than a variable aperture lens. It doesn't produce much bokeh, even though this lens conveniently has a very small minimal focusing distance, you can get really close up to your subject, but the bokeh is minimal as well, if you want to shoot product images I'd recommend you the sigma 16mm f1.4 instead.
Focusing speed is very fast, I have nothing to complaint, it can easily catch up with fast motion, also since it's wide angle lens that makes it easier for the lens to do the job as well. The focus motor is basically silent, I have never noticed any noise from this lens.
Image quality wise, i think it does a pretty good job, solid sharpness across the frame, from edge to edge, it's known that there are a lot of bad copies of this lens that produce very soft images, but luckily mine has no such issue and i'm totally happy with it.
All these goodness packed in one tiny lens that can be used on crop camera as well as fullframe camera, you can shoot crop mode on your A7 series or even shoot in fullframe mode, at about 14mm you can eliminate the vingnetting but i don't bother to use fullframe mode with this lens due to heavy distortion and the hassle of switching between fullframe and crop mode on my a7rii.
In the end, I think the only disadvantage is its price, when it came out it was priced at 850dollars US and over the year the price dropped very slowly, I remember it was still at 700 euros in 2018, but now in 2019 it seems have dropped quite a lot, 589euro for a new copy at the making of this video, but still, it's more or less twice as much as a Canon counterpart, which I also considered to use with adaptor.
In the end, my conclusion is, if you can find a used copy on ebay, get it, because it's a wonderful little wide lens that can come to handy whenever you need. But the price on brand new copy is a bit too much still, either way, at least you won't be disappointed by the performance of this lens.
I bought it used in May 2019, I think it's very essential focal range to add to the kit, 10-18mm is fullframe equivalent of 15-27mm, covers a nice range of ultra wide angle that can be so helpful when you are shooting in narrow space. It perfectly complements the popular Tamron 28-75mm lens, it's a perfect lens for selfie and vlogging as well.
The lens itself is impressively tiny comparing to fullframe lenses, it's also slightly smaller and lighter than its canon counter part, which makes it easy to carry around, ideal for run and gun shooting.
Build quality is good, not as good as lenses such as Tamron 28-75mm or sigma e mount prime series, but it's good and solid in its own way. Zoom ring and focus rings are solid metal which I don't like, because they grind my fingernails and makes me cringe.
At 18mm the lens is at its shortest, when you zoom out to 10mm which is very often you use this lens for, the barral sticks out a bit, which makes it longer, but you won't see the difference if you have lens hood on.
The lens has OSS, optical steady shot, which is super helpful when shooting handheld, people like me using a6300 instead of a6500 will benefit a lot from it, I'm glad that they put that in there. F4 max aperture on APS-C sensor is not as impressive as an F4 in fullframe's terms, but it's definitely better than a variable aperture lens. It doesn't produce much bokeh, even though this lens conveniently has a very small minimal focusing distance, you can get really close up to your subject, but the bokeh is minimal as well, if you want to shoot product images I'd recommend you the sigma 16mm f1.4 instead.
Focusing speed is very fast, I have nothing to complaint, it can easily catch up with fast motion, also since it's wide angle lens that makes it easier for the lens to do the job as well. The focus motor is basically silent, I have never noticed any noise from this lens.
Image quality wise, i think it does a pretty good job, solid sharpness across the frame, from edge to edge, it's known that there are a lot of bad copies of this lens that produce very soft images, but luckily mine has no such issue and i'm totally happy with it.
All these goodness packed in one tiny lens that can be used on crop camera as well as fullframe camera, you can shoot crop mode on your A7 series or even shoot in fullframe mode, at about 14mm you can eliminate the vingnetting but i don't bother to use fullframe mode with this lens due to heavy distortion and the hassle of switching between fullframe and crop mode on my a7rii.
In the end, I think the only disadvantage is its price, when it came out it was priced at 850dollars US and over the year the price dropped very slowly, I remember it was still at 700 euros in 2018, but now in 2019 it seems have dropped quite a lot, 589euro for a new copy at the making of this video, but still, it's more or less twice as much as a Canon counterpart, which I also considered to use with adaptor.
In the end, my conclusion is, if you can find a used copy on ebay, get it, because it's a wonderful little wide lens that can come to handy whenever you need. But the price on brand new copy is a bit too much still, either way, at least you won't be disappointed by the performance of this lens.
Comments
Post a Comment