Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc. In the FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens, Sony employed an iris diaphragm with seven rounded blades, which has resulted in quite appealing bokeh in our view. We do realise, however, that bokeh evaluation is subjective, so we've included several 100% crops for your perusal. The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens has a metal lens mount. It accepts 55mm filters via plastic threads.

The wide and ridged zoom ring and the narrower manual focus ring are the only external controls of note. Manual focusing is possible via the textured focus ring when set on the specific camera body. The lens utilizes a linear motor to produce quiet and smooth focusing, making it well-suited to shooting video. Weighing in at 295grams, the plastic-bodied Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS is very light for a full-frame standard zoom lens. It's overall size complements a full-frame body like the Sony A7R body that we tested it with, as shown in the photos below. Note that the length of the lens hardly changes as you zoom from 28mm to 70mm.

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The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens is commendably supplied with both a soft case and a fairly good quality plastic petal-shaped lens hood. The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens boasts built-in Optical SteadyShot image stabilisation to help ensure clearer, sharper handheld shots. This is important as the A7 and A7R don't have a built-in image stabilisation system. In practice we found that the Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS reliably offered around 3-stops of compensation. With the lens set to its maximum aperture, there is very obvious light fall-off in the corners, requiring you to stop down by at least 3 f-stops to prevent it. There's quite a lot of barrel distortion evident at 28mm in the RAW files - the Sony A7/A7R automatically and successfully apply corrections to the JPG files. At 70mm there's some pin-cushioning in the RAW files, which is again corrected when shooting JPGs. Build quality is pretty good given the budget price-tag of what is after all a humble kit lens. The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS has a sealed dust and moisture resistant design and is a natural partner for the A7 and A7R cameras.

The Sony FE 28-70mm F3.5-5.6 OSS lens has quite a wide focus ring. There are no hard stops at either end of the range, making it a little more difficult to set focus at infinity. Polariser users should be pleased that the 55mm filter thread doesn't rotate on focus.Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as blue or purple fringes along contrasty edges, were apparent in quite a lot of our test shots, especially in high contrast areas. The examples below show the worst-case scenario.