DxOmark tested two great lenses:
1) The Sony FE 28-70mm lens (Click here to read the test). The surprise is that it is almost as good as the 24-70mm FE Zeiss:
Although enthusiasts will head straight for the Zeiss, anyone on a budget won’t feel short-changed from the Sony 28-70mm f3.5-4.5. It has some shortcomings, particularly with regard to uniformity at the wider apertures where it’s easily outclassed by the Zeiss but the Sony puts up a good fight overall and doesn’t cost the earth.
2) Samyang 24mm f/1.4 A-mount lens (Click here to read the test):
Wide-open performance isn’t particularly impressive but sharpness improves noticeably at f2.0, at least in the center of the field. Transmission when measured on the A99 is excellent and both distortion and chromatic aberration are very well controlled. Vignetting is heavy at the maximum aperture but it’s not unexpected and hardly a serious problem.
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i wonder why it took so long to test this lens…
all this time people claimed the kit lens is as good as the zeiss
Sony is simply robbing us as far as it goes for the zeiss version…
It has been tested for quite a while, just not blogged about and compared pointlessly to other lenses in overly simplistic ways that completely fail to explain the whole story.
Unfortunately for most of the melodramatic posters in these comment threads, one must actually dive into the detailed data to see how the Zeiss is significantly better at every setting, despite its shortcomings. DxOMark’s summary scores are deceptive at best.
The summary scores while rather random should be ignored, All the detailed data is however very valuable and provides far betetr information . The real problem is not DXO but people not looking at the actual data. I would like to see their formula for overall scores perhaps a random number generator lol
The test proved how bad Zeiss 24-70 is lol
Wow, they are both terrible. 15Mpxl out of a 36 Mpxl camera? Holy smokes! What a piece of junk. My Canon 24-70 2.8II gets more or out of my 20 Mpxl 6D… Thank God I didn’t go Sony. Looks like I’ll need to stick with Canon for a while until Sony has some decent lenses… Sad, really sad. I love Sony. Especially if that A6000 AF system comes to their FF line. Come on Sony!
Canon 24-70 2.8 II @ $2250 DXO mark = 26 vs Sony FE 28-70 3.5-5.6 @ $500 DXO mark = 22. Wow! You sure made the right choice! Those extra 4 points cost about $425 each but so worth it because you have a Canon so you must be a professional…….go away.
one also happens to be a full stop faster too .. i’m sure that factors in.
Even worse than that; a Tamron 24-70/f 2,8 Di VC USD got 26 points on DXO mark and costs $ 1279; so you pay roughly $ 1000 just to have a canon lens! and the tamron performs superb in reality and is more of an understatement since it is just black as the camera and not that “signal white”…think about that and don’t tell me that 3rd party lenses do not count… I take the best lens, no matter if it’s “original” or 3rd party…
I actually own the Tamron 24-70 2.8 as well. Bought it for $929 (unauthorized retailer hehe.) It’s a very good lens. I bought it for video and low light as it is stabilized.
There are two slight issues with it for me: (1) sadly, it is NOT as sharp as the Canon, and (2) the AF is slower than the Canon’s. It’s not terrible, but noticeably slower. Otherwise, I can highly recommend it if you need the IS / the Canon is out of your budget, and you don’t mind that it’s a little less sharp. It is still sharp
Haha, what an emotional crowd here.
I love Sony. I own the RX100 II. i bought it the first week it came out. I also bought the original RX100 the first week it hit the shelves. I even bought one for my girlfriend. i take it with me everywhere (the RX100 II, not the girlfriend.)
while i made a mistake above thinking that the 24-70 here was Sony’s 2.8 lens, that expensive Sony 24-70 2.8 is still only an OK lens. Even Tamron’s offering is sharper for half the price…
Bottom line: Sony really needs to up its game on the lens lineup for serious photographers to switch. I would like it very much if they did. Canon is an arrogant company that is slow to innovate and is way behind in sensor tech, unlike Sony.
looking at the slrgear tests between the Canon 24-70mm F4 and the Sony 24-70 F4 the Sony is simply woeful . It is inferior { often sunstantially } at every single aperture and focal length.. Throughout its range the Sony 24-70mm F4 is outperformed by even the cheap Nikon 24-85mm G kit lens at all matching apertures and focal lengths. The Sony is especially weak at 24mm
Your comparison between the Canon an F2,8 lens tested on a significantly lower resoloution sensor is seriously flawed. The Canon is achive a resoloution score of 16 on a 21mp sensor the Sony score 16mp on a 36mp sensor . As for your childish jibe about being a “professional” lets be honest for every pro shooting Sony there will be a 1000 shooting Canon.
Sadly I’ve sold all my Canon gear, and now my A7 is listed everywhere as I am planning to go back to Canon.
What kind of a fool are you?
what kinda stupid a..hole are you?
Not the kind that would sell all my canon gear to buy another system only to not like it cause I obviously didn’t do my research and sell it all to buy canon again. I am not that guy.
what’s the point of your stupid argument? did you just got frustrated because I’m losing money or the fact that I’ve insulted your Sony brand or you’re just stupid?
Why would I care that you insult a brand? It isn’t my company. And why would I care you lost money? So I guess by deduction that means I must be stupid. But for my answer to that re-read my previous post. It’s not an argument, what I say is fact, there is no arguing over it.
Sony has the 24-70 f/2.8, a direct counterpart to your Canon lens.
This FE lens is a completely different thing, it is designed for compactness, not quality.
Correction: I was looking at this on my phone last night and mistakenly thought this 24-70 was Sony’s 24-70 2.8. (The shiny Zeiss logo threw me off here hehe.) Still, getting 15 Mpxl out of a 36 Mpxl sensor is not something I would like… Again, I love Sony, but went with Canon for the lenses, NOT for the bodies. For the bodies, I would go Sony any day once they put that A6000 AF system into their FF bodies. This “Eye-AF” thing is pretty neat. (It’s not well-implements yet. I tried it in B&H and it focused on the further eye on the A7, NOT on the closer eye, but i’m sure that will be fixed with later iterations. It may even function properly on the A6000 already.)
Eye AF works perfectly on my A7
great to hear that. can it also track moving people well?
i tried it on the sales person at B&H, and he was wearing glasses. The A7 locked onto his further eye, but this was probably because it didn’t even recognize his closer eye due to the glare on his glasses. i can see how that would trick eye-AF
also, we tried it out with the A mount 24-70 2.8, and that lens was not supported for eye-AF. it appears that only native EF mount lenses are supported. that’s a petty as they are not great, and theg selection is poor for the time being. (no 24-70 2.8, no 70-200 2.8, no 85 1.2 or at least 1.4, etc…)
If the mark means everything to u in evaluating a lens, then most of us should consider lenses from Samyang only
24-70 fe is still a good lens, my only complain is too expensive……
For its IQ, it is too too expensive. You’d expect better sharpness less Distortion and CA when you pay this much.
I agree with u, distortion could be better.at 24mm
Interesting to compare it with Canon 24-70 2.8-II, just like some ppl compared A7 A7R with D4, or 1DX…….
I just looked at the Canon zooms on DXO. Their sharpness scores are no higher than these lenses.
Of course. The best camera Canon zooms can be tested on is 5D MK3, which has 22MP w/ LP filter. Both Sony/Zeiss lens were tested on A7r, which has 36MP w/o LP filter. The weakness of Sony/Zeiss lens is at the corner, which never mention in the test. I am looking forward DXO testing Canon lens on A7r
That’s why I still see myself using kit lens while other people complain a lot about it. It’s soft at 70mm though..
I’m actually still using the kit. It’s pretty good. I also have the canon 24-70 mark 1 used on a 5d3. The images on the kit comes out looking sharper to me if you don’t zoom in and pixel peak.
If you don’t zoom in you’re comparing your software scaling algorithms, not the lens.
“The surprise is that it is almost as good as the 24-70mm FE Zeiss” it just means they are both almost as equally just average lenses.
Either one of them mounted on a A7R with no AA filter thus getting the most resolving power from a 36Mp sensor – with jacked up RAW sharpening which should make any lens look better, can’t match a 5D mark III with a fairly strong AA filter, no raw “magic sauce” mounted 24-70/4 IS which is a fairly pedestrian lens.
it resolves as much (or more sadly enough), better transmission, better CA control, better distortion and and vignetting.
hoping the purported UWA makes a better matched pair to the A7R than these two fairly pedestrian lenses.
Now I hope the upcoming 16-35 was Sony G and not Zeiss
It is already confirmed to be branded Zeiss as well as including OSS. There is no mystery about that. We just don’t yet know what it will look like, cost, or when it will arrive.
Sony.
1 step forward, 2 steps back…
I’ve been waiting forever for good lenses and sony has come out with a million cameras instead.
Besides a handful of gems (CZ 135/2, FE 55/1.8, RX1’s 35mm f/2 Zeiss), Sony has produced nothing but mediocre trash lenses. When they do produce something decent, it’s still typically last-in-class and dramatically more expensive than it’s worth. Typically it’s better both in optical performance and price to buy third party.
For me, and I suspect many others, the reasons to be a Sony shooter are less about the glass and more about the unique approach to their product offering. Smaller, lighter, faster, some combination of the three, etc.
And then you just try to enjoy the hell out of the few really great lenses available, while learning how to avoid the landmines in the next-best offerings (like the FE 24-70 Zeiss. It’s mostly pretty good, actually, you just have to know the handful of settings to avoid, same with the FE 70-200)
Anyway, higher expectations are not really justified by the history here.
What!? Sony’s released some fantastic lenses over the years. At the end of the day you’re not going to get a performance zoom in an e-mount friendly format.
Let me hope that the rumored 16-35 f/4 zoom is a lot better than the other mediocre zooms.
Wow the 28-70 beats the Zeiss 24-70 in sharpness and distortion o.O
You’re being deceived by DxOMark’s unnecessarily obfuscated scoring system. In reality, the 24-70 is a much better lens overall. If you actually dive down into the measurements of each lens, see the sharpness field maps, distortion maps, CA maps, and other things at all the different settings, you’ll see that the 24-70 has a more usable frame at far more settings than the 28-70, not to mention it’s got the 24-27mm range that the 28-70 lacks entirely.
All these scores say is that, for each measurement, here is the best the lens can do across all the possible FL and aperture combinations, on average. It doesn’t get into the important differences that make lenses more or less useful for a given task.
So if you want to find any useful info from DxOMark, you must A) know what you actually need from a lens and B) look at the detailed measurements data to see if the lens meets your needs.
Exactly. Overall scores are for the masses.
Ah I see , thanks for letting me know 🙂
I work in a camera shop. Tested both lenses and the 28-70 is one of the worst lenses i have seen. Tested on a7 manual mode at 5.6 and wide open. 28-70 has no resolution..no sharpness on corners and a lot of distortion and coma. If you don’t believe try for yourself. Dxomark started to be one of the worst review sites. But as i said. Try for yourself and see
Well said. I think the majority of people who work in camera shops know how really bad this lens is.
Yeah you mean those people who hold the lens in their hands and have their conclusion drawn? I can tell you from my experience that most of them are less interested in how good or bad a lens is and care more about “pushing boxes” to customers. I think that the ones that really know which camera’s or lenses are good are a minority. It is all about convincing customers to buy certain products.
I bet that you didn’t tested the camera with lense more than a few minutes and yet you come here and draw such hateful conclusions. You must be a sony / dxo hater and a fool, since after few shots in manual mode you are able to refutate DxOmark.
And why the heck would you shot in manual mode ? CDAF are very accurate, even more than the much faster PDAF.
I could only find reviews that have come to the same conclusions than DxOMark.
Let me show them to you :
http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews/sony_fe_28_70mm_f3_5_5_6_oss_review/sample_images/
http://www.lemondedelaphoto.com/TEST-BONUS-MDLP-23-Sony-28-75-mm-8945.html
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2428065,00.asp
http://erphotoreview.com/wordpress/?p=3992
http://soundimageplus.blogspot.fr/2013/12/sony-fe-28-70mm-f35-56-oss-zoom-lens.html
Sorry, over saw that you commented alread with links, anyway i just added a few more links in my comment, which come to the same conclusion and that is that the 28-70 is a pretty good lens considering its price.
As I stated before that is not my and many others experience, see some links below, maybe a matter of a bad copy?
http://www.alinpopescu.eu/blog/full-review-of-the-sony-a7-full-frame-mirrorless/
http://www.photographyblog.com/reviews/sony_fe_28_70mm_f3_5_5_6_oss_review/conclusion/
http://soundimageplus.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/sony-fe-28-70mm-f35-56-oss-zoom-lens.html
http://www.binarycafe.com/2014/01/05/1716/
It is really annoying how tou people complain about how bad a lensthat you never used is bad.the 24-70 is areally good lens. Good sharpness contrast and everything. 28-70 has nothing. The pictures look hazy and smudged and with low contrast. Plus the heavy coma which makes everything look with a halo of green and magenta
I guess you got a bad copy of the 28-70, this is not my and many others experience.
Agree, 28-70 pretty good zoom, lightweighted, stabilized and absolute acceptable general image quality. I generaly use fixes, but often enjoy the advantages of this pleasant and good, little zoom
The 24-70 f2.8 is a really good lens. The 24-70 f4, on the other hand, isn’t in the same league… Horses for courses though – the f4 is designed to be light weight and compact, so something had to give.
If the 28-70 is a pretty good variable aperture kit zoom lens for ff, then the 24-70 is a mediocre premium zoom lens that’s a joke considering the distortion and the edge sharpness that’s bad even @ f8-f11. Add the bad copies and Sony users are living a little nightmare… Why isn’t Sony Zeiss capable of producing a good premium zoom? (the primes are stelar indeed)
http://photobyandrei.wordpress.com/
Don’t get fooled by the numbers. DXO states that only peak sharpness on the 2870 is 1mpx higher.
It’s not bad, but since I own the 2 Zeiss primes I’ve never used it again, and probably never will. It was a good lens to get to know the Camera and wait a month before deciding to committing to the system and buying expensive Zeiss primes.
Sometimes I think the 2470/4 was made with the A7s in mind, thus they heavily promote the A7s with the Zeiss zoom on most Marketing pictures.
That makes sense, it surprised me that they weren’t using the 28-135… I’ve always seen the e-mount as more a prime platform, given the obvious size/quality advantages.
I really don’t get it. Eversince I started with Sony cameras the Sony Zeiss lenses have been magical for me. I own almost all for the A-mount (except the 24/2) and for my aged NEX7 the 24 and the 1670. I love them all – all have the one or the other technical topic, but in overall nothing critical to rave about.
Now considering jumping on the FE train I am very interested in the native lenses available.
A standard zoom 2470 is an important one for me, so I was excited when they announced the FE 2470Z.
Probably my expectation to the FE2470 as the “near-flawless” everyday standard zoom where to high, but I assume that most of you will agree with me that the price-performance-ratio of it is extremely poor.
I pretty well know that most issues can be corrected during post processing, but I really don’t want to process every image individually.
I rarely do large prints (e.g. 40×28″), so corner sharpness is for me not field-relevant in overall.
But it is a little bit disappointing if a lens does not get that even at f11.
It’ll be interesting to see how the Samyang compares to the Sigma 24mm art… I’ve got the Minolta 24/2.8 now (as a super light walkabout), but it’s not exactly mind blowing wide open (even compared to the 16-50).
at this point I’m just hoping that the 16-35mm uwa zoom will be better than this 24-70…..
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To be honest I was extremely disappointed with the FE Zeiss 24-70mm f4 zoom lens… so much so that I bought the Canon version of the Metabones adapter with AF and also bought the Sigma ART 24-105mm f4 lens. The Sigma is MUCH sharper than the Zeiss (which is embarrassing for Sony and for Zeiss) and has a wider range, too. Since then I’ve bought a couple of other Canon ‘L’ lens off of Craigslist and I’m very happy with my purchases.
Sony will never quite be a ‘pro’ camera option if they don’t get super sharp glass out there with there own name on it for the FE mount. Yes, the 55mm f1.8 is a killer sharp lens… but that is the exception rather than the usual pattern so far/
I have both the zoom lenses … the 28-70 came as a kit lens when I bought the a7 and later on I bought the 24-70 f/4 … the 24-70 is not “stellar” in comparison to f/2.8 lenses for the DSLR cameras, but it is definitely a great step up from the 28-70 … don’t believe everything the DxO guys dish out … if you have the money and prefer the convenience of a zoom lens, get the 24-70 f/4 … if budget is a problem get the 28-70 it will do a fine job … but do know that you will get better quality images with the 24-70 f/4