Sony SEL55F18Z.AE 55mm f/1.8 ZA Lens - Black

Product Information

When shooting in AF-S single shot mode, the camera needs to de-focus the lens before focusing on the subject which leads to a noticeable slowdown. Nevertheless, overall focus speed is good enough for most uses and accuracy is superb for static subjects including good accuracy in low-light conditions.

Chromatic aberration is pretty low. There'll be some green/magenta fringing visible towards the extreme corners of the frame if you look closely, but it's unlikely to be hugely objectionable. It will be automatically corrected in the camera's JPEGs, too. Distortion is extremely low, with just a little barrel-type visible if you look closely. This will also be corrected automatically by the camera when shooting JPEG. The focusing ring is very wide, buttery smooth and beautifully well-damped in action without being loose, and it has a ridged, rubberised grip band. There are no “hard stops” at either end of the 50cm-infinity focus range though.Sharpness is simply spectacular. At F1.8 the 55mm is impressively sharp, outperforming the 50mm F1.8s for Canon and Nikon SLRs by a substantial margin (and the 50mm F1.4s for that matter, too). It just gets better on stopping down; at F4 and F5.6, central sharpness is literally off the charts (helped here by being tested on the 36MP, AA filterless A7R). Diffraction takes the edge off sharpness at F22, as usual, but this setting should still be perfectly usable when depth of field is a priority. With a standard focal length of 44mm (35mm equivalent), we wouldn't expect this lens to have too many problems with distortion. The scale of Sony's achievement here becomes clear when comparing the FE 55mm F1.8 directly to the Zeiss Otus 55mm F1.4, which lays a strong claim to being the best lens for which we have test data. The Otus still just about comes out on top - it measures as slightly sharper wide open - but it's unlikely any difference will be particularly visible in real-world photography. The Otus also just about wins out on chromatic aberration and distortion, but overall the Sony can certainly wear its Zeiss badge with pride.

Here is the kind of sharpness you can expect at f/1.8: ILCE-7M3 + Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA (SEL55F18Z) @ 55mm, ISO 250, 1/1600, f/2.2 f/1.8, center crop f/1.8, corner crop Introduced alongside Sony’s first full-frame mirrorless cameras in 2013, the Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA lens was the first fast-aperture, “standard” focal length prime lens available for the FE mount. The 50mm prime lens has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, with many new lenses in this focal range introduced by lens manufacturers over the last half-decade. Sony themselves now offer four different 50mm prime lens options for the FE mount. Beyond the FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA lens, there is the entry-level Sony FE 50mm f/1.8, the premium Sony FE 50mm f/1.4 ZA and the Sony FE 50mm f/2.8 Macro lens.It might be a relatively older design (Compared to other FE lenses) but the FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA remains a fantastic lens and one of the best standard prime lens options for Sony’s mirrorless camera system. Optically, it’s excellent with outstanding sharpness in the center of the frame when used at f/1.8 and truly incredible corner to corner sharpness just a couple of stops down. The lens also has a very pleasing bokeh, very good contrast and performs incredibly well against bright sources of light. The one genuine optical flaw is the high amounts of bokeh fringing at f/1.8 and this doesn’t really disappear until the lens is stopped down to f/5.6.

The maximum aperture of f/1.7 makes it the joint-world’s brightest lens with autofocus for medium format mirrorless digital cameras, along with the GF 80mm F1.7. R WR lens. It is comprised of 14 elements in 10 groups including including two ED elements and two aspherical elements and it's the first ever GF lens to have 11 rounded aperture blades for ultra-smooth bokeh.Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as purple or blue fringes along contrasty edges, are apparent in very high-contrast images, particularly when shooting wide-open at f/1.7. Light Fall-off

In conjunction with the GFX 100 II's high-resolution electronic viewfinder, we found it very easy to accurately determine critical sharpness when manually focusing . We didn't experience too much "hunting", with the lens accurately focusing almost all of the time, even in low-light conditions. Thanks to the inclusion of In-body stabilization or IBIS in Sony’s mirrorless camera bodies, their lenses don’t need to have built-in image stabilization to be stabilized. As such, the Sony FE 55mm f/1.8 ZA isn’t optically stabilized but it does benefit from the IBIS system of the Sony camera it’s mounted on and I found that I could achieve consistently sharp shots at shutter speeds of around 1/10 of a second while hand-holding the lens. This number dramatically drops at lower shutter speeds. Still, having image stabilization in such a small lens is a fantastic feature and one of the main selling points of the Sony system. 6) Bokeh Notice the very minor flaring on the bottom of the image frame: ILCE-7M3 + Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA @ 55mm, ISO 320, 1/200, f/16.0 9) Chromatic Aberration The lens exhibits a strong amount of vignetting, with light falloff reaching around 2.5 stops with the lens used wide open at f/1.8. One stop down, things greatly improve with there now being about 1.5 stops of corner shading. By f/5.6, this number further improves with the lens exhibiting less than one stop of darkening in the corners. ILCE-7M3 + Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 55mm F1.8 ZA @ 55mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/1.8 8) FlaringIt doesn't feel particularly unwieldy when mounted on the equally new Fuji GFX 100 II camera that we tested it with, with even one-handed use not completely out of the question!