Brian Matiash from Photofocus (Click here) reviewed the new 16-35mm f/4.0 FE Zeiss lens:
Images produced with this lens are very sharp and consistent with minimal softness in the corners. I also didn’t notice any chromatic aberration with photos taken at locations with very high dynamic ranges…As far as I’m concerned, this is a Must-Have lens for all of the Sony A7 shooters out there.
Zeiss FE 16-35mm preorder links:
Zeiss 16-35mm FE at Amazon, Adorama, BHphoto, Sony Store US.
Zeiss 16-35mm FE in Europe at Sony DE, UK, ES, IT, FR, CH, AT, NL, BE, FI, SE, NO, PT.
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Wish he had some more sample images, and posted the full size versions to look at. Looks good so far though
Viktor at http://www.verybiglobo.com/photokina-2014-sony-first-impression-fe-16-35-f4-oss-za-some-raw-samples-for-download/ has full size images. Comparison to ZA zoom too.
“this is a Must-Have lens for all of the Sony A7 shooters out there”?
This is “almost” the only lens available for the A7 owner out there!!!
You must be living under a rock………
Don’t feed the troll.
Unless you are subscribing to the adapter paranoia or you absolutely need AF on an UWA, you are wrong.
The adapters are free? Tell me where? And while you’re at it,can you tell me which lenses work well with this camera? Or I have to trust the tests found on the net?
Not free, I meant the paranoia about degraded IQ. Also, you don’t make much sense – if you do not trust tests on the net, then you should be testing everything by yourself and certainly not asking me on the net about which lenses work on the camera. Btw, pretty much every DSLR lens will work on these cameras and even some rangefinder ones will do a fine job.
Absolutely right…. especially about the available native AF lens.
sad but true….
I hope and beliew in this lens. It is a must have for all serius shooters. Ordered it the firts day
You can be a serious shooter without needing an ultra wide angle. Just depends “what” you shoot.
Ultra wide for me is called doing a panoramic. If that doesn’t work a fisheye. If that doesn’t work then I simply move the mountains and sky by squeezing them into the frame of my picture and then taking the shot.
I’ve been a “serious shooter” for decades and have never owned a wide angle beyond 35mm. I fail to see any correlation with seriousness and ultra wides. They hold no interest for me, I can make an ultrawide using multiple exposures stitched together and get vastly more resolution, but I don’t because I have little interest in wide angle shots.
This just shows that you know nothing about wide angles. It isn’t just about ‘fitting more in the frame’.
You don’t need it, but others do. Just not for you 😉
This lens could do it for me. It could get me to go over to the dark E mount side. We shall see, more pics needed.
The lenses are 1 stop darker but the sensor 1 stop brighter. 😉
Nice to see samples but keep in mind he is a Sony sponsored photog.
Yes, I think he cranked up the resolution in ACR and used a Sakai Takayuki for that sunburst.
Any degrade of performance using this on the E-mount/Nex series? Lens would look and feel too big on the a6000/a5100. Hope Sony makes a similar 16-35mm zoom for smaller emounts.
Why would you have a degraded performance? There’s a 10-18 for APS-C, cheap, small, light and stabilized.
wow… I would not have known or ever heard about that 10-18mm lens. Everybody with an emount camera already knows the emount lens available made by sony. LOL
Bravo! No need to hope then.
+1
While an additional data point is always good… I think the reviewer goes way too far (to the point of degrading his own credibility) to proclaim it as a “must-have lens for all of the Sony A7 shooters” when the only thing he has done is to shoot it stopped-down on a tripod.
Heck, even the much-maligned SEL16F28 did reasonably okay when stopped down.
For these slow constant aperture zooms, the mark of greatness is corner excellence when stopped down minimally (f/5.6), and dare-we-hope… good performance wide open. Because it sure as heck already starts ‘stopped-down’.
I think it would be good to wait until DXOMark/photozone.de/SLRgear has something to say about it on a f-stop-by-f-stop basis.
Side note: the SEL1018 shaped up to a good overall field sharpness by f/5.6.
Addendum: I see that he has a shot at f/4 and f/6.3, but with no corners than can be evaluated (i.e. obscured in darkness).
Indeed, most of the question for me is it clean in the corners at the wide end? That a fairly major problem for the a7R and a bit less less of one for the a7.
17mm clearance is not much and the light is arriving at a pretty large angle at the corners. The microlens deal has to be used right or we get mush. I suspect Zeiss has got it largely right but it would be nice to see.
That is my suspicion as well. It’s over 50% longer than the SEL1018, which I presume is from a more-telecentric design. I’m sure Sony took the lessons of the NEX-7 to heart, and I have a high degree of confidence that they have this covered, as it was probably their priority.
What remains is to be seen is distortion at the wide end, and performance at wider apertures. Sony generally does OSS well, and I would be surprised if this was any different.
Yes because there are a lot of much faster stabilised UWA zooms on the market! Heck the only faster ones are a pitiful one stop faster, hardly a super slow UWA zoom.
Do you, for some odd reason, think I’m complaining about its speed?
Or did you catch that I might actually be talking about what most consider the hallmark of quality in a zoom lens: how early in its f-stop range it reaches a nice overall IQ?
Yes I do think you were complaining about speed, claiming it’s already stopped down (it isnt) and that it is a slow constant aperture zoom. Actually for most people UWA lenses are used as stopped down as possible (landscape) for DoF and as open as possible for event and PJ work. Does anyone really care about the performance at slightly stopped down? Maybe a few, but it is hardly a hallmark of this kind of lens. As far as I can tell it is remarkably good wide open (as many of the latest UWA’s are) and spanks things like the Canon 16-35mm f2.8 L and Tokina 16-28mm f2.8, Canon 17-40mm f4 and many others.
No, you’re just complaining for the sake of complaining.
I’m just not ready to fall into infatuation and proclaim it the best-thing-since-sliced-bread in the absence of *really relevant evidence* to justify such a sentiment.
I mean, I guess if you *must* love it (for your commitment to Sony), then I guess I can understand why you must be there already.
Folks, why some of you are “bitching” about this otherwise gorgeous lens. If so, why don’t you buy Leica primes which are 4x ( + ) in price, some very good magnifying glass and study corners of images you take … I am sure, that that will make you very happy …
For rest of photographers this new New, Zeiss 16-35mm FE will do “just” fine …
They’ll always be people “bitching” about something and best of all, most of the time these people won’t even buy one even if it’s released based on their “spec” as something must give (in most cases it’ll be priced beyond their budget or heavier), it’s like I want the car to drive, perform like a Lamborghini but I want it to be priced as a Ford Fiesta
Wished it exhibited cleaner sunstars (completely disagree with Mr. Matiash’s assessment on this)…as much as I love the corner sharpness and compact size, that could be a deal-breaker for me. Will wait for a few more formal reviews to trickle in first before pulling the trigger on the Canon version, though.
There is a Canon version of this lens?
http://kenrockwell.com/canon/lenses/16-35mm-is.htm
LOL.
I’m curious what you found amusing about the Canon lens?
Hahahaha
Will never purchase another fly-by-wire focusing lens again, no matter how it performs.
Not for me.
Hope you all enjoy this lens, and it serves you well.
I’ll skip on UHT milk! Not for me
What’s wrong with fly-by-wire? I tend to like it, especially the auto-zoom feature it activates.
I could never get the ratios down right. Seemed to be leveraging some type of accelerometer. Turning fast is really fast. Turning slow sometimes doesn’t focus at all. No end stops to either end of focusing range. Feels like a playstation controller. No tactile feedback.
I’ll stick with the magnify button.
Worst of all, it’s so dissimilar to my other lenses.
Now, I had an Olympus OM-88 years back, with fly by wire focus. It was very sweet, and ratio was perfect for tactile feedback, always predictable with slow or fast turning… focus was on a control wheel on back of camera, instead of lens. I really enjoyed that. I don’t enjoy Sony’s implementation.
I see. I have just 2 native e-mount lenses (the 35 and 55 FF) and for me they seem to focus ok by wire. But I think it would be nice if Sony would make the focusing behavior customizable, something like “accelerated focusing” vs “constant speed”, can be done in the next firmware update if lots of people complain 🙂
This site has become so full of ads that it is literally getting difficult to read the content.
I’m still using my userContent.css from 2009 myself. There are a few down the side, that’s it for me.
It is amazing that ancient script, derived from an even older script, still does the job. They are greedy, but not all that smart.
Adblocker is your friend.
It’s actually mostly on my phone, bloody auto play video ad that pops up every two seconds!
Firefox on Android supports all plugins including Adblocker Plus. I’ve tried the stand-alone Adblocker, but it didn’t work well for me. On the iPhone I had a few apps including a browser that supposed to filter ads, but they weren’t much reliable. Yep, the ads are annoying, but I’m glad solutions like Adblocker exist to make our life less miserable 🙂
Yeah, but it kind of defeats the purpose, they load up more ads, we block them more and everyone loses…
Have to disagree with you here – there is no correlation in my opinion,
the number of ads solely depends on greed of the webmaster 🙂
Excellent image quality. I love the color and contrast!
I just put my order now, can’t wait to get it!
I would not call this a “review”, rather “initial impressions”.
Having said that I already placed an order for this lens (at a very reasonable price). A bit of a risk, but it would suit me fine. Both on the A7r and the A6000. The 350g 16-70/4 is no problem on the 6000 and neither would the 16-50 be a problem. Have used the 500g Nikon 200/4 MF on the A6000 and it works great both weight balance and image quality wise.
For myself as a landscape shooter this is the lens that will
hopefully make my A7R purchase worthwhile. To be honest other than when
shooting with the 35mm or the wonderful 55mm I have gradually drifted back to
shooting nearly all my stuff with my D810 { a far more rounded piece of
equipment} .For most applications I simply do not see the sense in bolting
large FF adapted glass such as my 14-24 on to an adapter on the A7R,spread over a
camera bag with a couple of lenses and accessories the weight saving is hardly
a big deal.
For many situations the 16-35mm range is more useful than a 14-24 so I
really hope it measures up. The macro lens is also on my interest list .
It’s a shame. Waited so long for this lens to come out. Traveling to Burma 02. november. Most probably without this lens. 🙁
100% without this lens.
You still have enough time to get an OM Zuiko 21mm or 24mm though ;-).
Olympus is 5 years into Micro Four Thirds an they still don’t have their complete PRO zoom line-up released. Sony is 1 year into the FE-system and has a full professional zoom line-up on the market. Very impressive. From the images I’m seeing, this 16-35mm lens seems to be a winner.
I’m not sure if I will get it though. Back in my Nikon DX days I barely touched my Tokina 11-16mm. The new 15mm Voigtlander or a potential upcoming wide-angle Loxia might be more convenient for me.
Oly bout to release the 40-150 2.8. They already have a few others and the pro wide should be out early next year. I don’t think they’re really missing anything at this point.
The usefulness of review is questionable. All except the picture of rails have been post-processed AND NOT mention anywhere until he got caught. How am I supposes to see the true performance of the lens?
Can anyone tell me, is the FE build on these Zeiss lenses as impressive as the Zeiss build on the A mount lenses?
IMO the primes, especially the 55mm is even better the A-mount counterparts (the 50 and 85), probably closer to the 135 quality. I was about to buy the 24-70 f//4, but after a few shots in a camera store decided to pass – the results were very unimpressive. The A-mount f/2.8 is a definitely better choice. I really hope the 16-35 will worth the blue badge (and based on the early reviews it should :). The announce of the 16-35 f/4 was holding me off purchasing the A-mount 16-35, but anyway before buying I’m gonna test it in a store extensively.
P.S. I do have the lenses I’ve mentioned 🙂
Interesting comment from Oleg. Fascinating how two of us can have such wildly opposite opinions. I returned my 55/1.8 FE for numerous reasons. One of which was the flimsy cheap build quality. It felt like toy junk. I actually wondered if the mount was plastic made to look like nickel, as it flexed on the body so much to show gaps shining light all the way through. Not nearly as robust as even the cheap minolta 35-70/4 original. Not the type of kit I want in my hands.
To each their own I guess.
Respectfully.