April 27, 2017

The A6000 50mm lens shootout

What I am aiming to do here is to get a handle on how bad (or good) the Sony 18-55 "kit lens" is on my Sony A6000 camera. My approach to doing that is to compare it to a couple of 50mm prime lenses that I have on hand that ought to be pretty good. I will exhibit the images in the following order: I am shooting off of a tripod at ISO 100 using the self timer to trip the shutter and using manual focus on a tall central cholla cactus in the center of the desert scene. I captured raw files, and converted them to JPEG using lightroom. The only lightroom correction performed was to adjust contrast by setting white and black points.

Since shooting a desert scene involves numerous objects at different distances and possibly set in motion by gentle breezes, I also photographed the side of my house.

First here are the overall images of the wall. Not much to see here other than to note that the Sony 18-55 lens seems to yield a "warmer" overall color.

Next, here are 1:1 crops from the center of each image:

And now, here are 1:1 crops from the extreme upper left

And now, here are 1:1 crops from the extreme lower left

And now, here are 1:1 crops from the extreme upper right

And now, here are 1:1 crops from the extreme lower right

My impressions looking at these are that the Sony does well in the center, but looses sharpness at the edges, more so at the bottom of the field than the top. This is probably some element alignment or centering issue in my particular copy of the lens. It seems to be commonly reported that this lens gets "softer" away from center.

Another conclusion is that the Canon 50mm macro is a fine lens (as is its brother, the 100mm macro -- I have yet to test my old school 200mm macro, but I expect great things from it).

And here are the images of the desert viewed from my porch. Again in the order Sony 18-55, Canon 50/1.4, Canon 50/3.5 macro.

If any enthusiasts want to see them full size, here are links to full resolution JPEG images (about 20M each) as well as raw files (about 25M each).

Here are 1:1 crops near the center of the image.

Here are 1:1 crops near the upper left

Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Digital Photography Info / tom@mmto.org