12/27/2023 0 Comments Sony e mount pancake lens frameThe VFA target should give you a good idea of sharpness in the center and corners, as well as some idea of the extent of barrel or pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration, while the Still Life subject may help in judging contrast and color. It's an interesting little lens, but its price point and its performance are perhaps limiting it to strictly consumer application. If you like the idea of a wide prime for your NEX camera, right now there's simply nothing else available. The size of the lens make a NEX camera system almost pocketable. The NEX kit lens, the 18-55mm ƒ/3.5-5.6, offers almost-as-wide performance, but without the constant ƒ/2.8 aperture. An adapter exists to allow you to mount standard alpha lenses, but the only comparable lens would be the 16mm ƒ/2.8 fisheye. Right now, there's precious little in the way of alternatives for the Sony E mount. The other accessories available for this lens are the wide-angle adapters, which we did not have an opportunity to test, but will allow the lens to operate as a 20mm fisheye lens (VCL-ECF1 adapter) or an 18mm ultrawide angle lens (VCL-ECU1 adapter). When attached, the petal-shaped lens hood will add 1 1/8'' to the overall length of the lens, and could be reversed for storage on the bayonet mount. While the lens doesn't ship with a lens hood, the hood from the 18-55mm lens will fit on this lens and function well (however, we don't know whether it's the recommended hood). The rubber focusing ring is 3/8'' wide, and will rotate forever in either direction with no hard or soft stops. All other functionality such as enabling or disabling autofocus is conducted on the camera. The only control surface on the lens is the focusing ring - there is simply no room on the lens for a depth-of-field scale or anything similar. The lens balances nicely on the NEX3 or 5 body, but it's worth noting that with the design of these cameras, the lens is offset to the left, and that does make that side of the camera slightly heavier. The front element is a tiny dime-size element, and the entire optical design of the lens is made up of just 5 elements, one of which is aspherical. The lens is very lightweight, weighing in at just 70 grams (2.5 oz). To its credit, the minimum close-focusing distance is short, at just 24cm (a little under a foot).Ī nice looking, very compact, pancake style lens that looks great on either the NEX3 or NEX5 bodies. Look elsewhere for macro performance - the lens has a magnification rating of just 0.073x. It makes the camera very easy to use for manual focusing with this lens. When using manual focus as you turn the ring the central section of the LCD displays an enlarged (7X or 14X) view of the image. The ring will turn all the way around with no stops. Small changes in focus are conducted extremely quickly. It is very fast as there is little to move inside the lens when focusing. The Sony 16mm ƒ/2.8 E is quick to autofocus - the lens takes less than a second to slew through the entire range of focus. In this case, there is some slight barrel distortion throughout the image (+0.2%), but in the corners, we note -0.7% distortion. What is surprising is that it's a fairly prominent pincushion distortion - wide-angle lenses usually produce barrel distortion. When used wide open at ƒ/2.8, the corners of the image are 2/3 EV darker than the center when used at any other aperture, the corners are 1/3 EV darker than the center.ĭistortion is usually a factor for wide-angle lenses, and so it's not surprise to find distortion in images shot with the 16mm ƒ/2.8 E. Light falloff is a factor, but not a huge one, with this lens. CA is most prominent when the lens is shot wide open at ƒ/2.8, and reduces slightly as the lens is stopped down. We noted a high level of chromatic aberration present in images shot with the 16mm ƒ/2.8 E, and not necessarily just in the corners. (Oddly, even at f/22, the corners are noticeably softer than the center.) Diffraction limiting begins to set in at ƒ/11, and the image is quite soft at f/22. Stopping down does improve results for sharpness, but not incredibly: by ƒ/4, it's 2-3 blur units, and it hits its maximum sharpness at ƒ/5.6-8, where the softer parts of the frame are about 2 blur units, while the center improves to about 1. The Sony E 16mm ƒ/2.8 pancake is fairly soft when used wide open at the ƒ/2.8 aperture: around 3-4 blur units on average, with a small sweet spot that is moderately sharper (about 1.5 blur units) in the center. The lens is available now separately for approximately $250, or as part of a NEX camera kit. The lens takes 49mm filters, and while a lens hood does not ship with the lens, the hood from the 18-55mm lens is compatible.
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