I met recently with my friend Zubair outside of Tout de Sweet cafe (best espresso and pastries in the area!) to compare a few lenses against my A7RII camera body and his new A6000 camera body. This was a series of lens tests to roughly compare the following lenses:
All lenses were used to photograph the same subjects on the A7RII and A600 bodies. The A7RII is a full frame sensor camera while A600 is an APS-C crop sensor. The Canon lens is a full-frame lens while the two Sony lenses are APS-C sized. One of the wonderful things about the Sony bodies is how versatile they are – you can use both APS-C and full frame lenses with either sensor size body, and you can use lenses from other brands such as Canon with full autofocus and other capabilities using an adapter like Metabones. For higher-resolutions images for those that care to pixel peep, you can find the full set here on Flickr. In this article I will just look at the results from the A7RII body. In part II we will have a look at the A6000 results. I seem to have had a hard time with the layout on this page and embedding larger size images, so click on the images to see more detail.
Sony A7RII Comparisons
Overview of all lenses on the A7RII:
Sony A7RII lens comparisons
Canon 50mm 1.2 f/8 vs. Zeiss 24mm 1.8 f/8, with Zeiss image cropped to show a similar area as the Canon:
canon vs zeiss lenses at f/8
Zoomed in for details (click to see full size – wow!):
canon vs zeiss, details
Canon & Zeiss cropped down to match the zoom lens at 46mm:
lens comparisons
details:
Canon full frame prime vs Sony APS-C zoom
who needs a zoom lens when you have a full frame Canon 1.2L paired with that incredible Sony sensor, eh? 🙂
Really interesting how much more detail and resolution you get from the Canon lens, too.
Notes & Thoughts
This was the first time I had picked up an A600, whereas I have been shooting with the A7RII for several months now. I was surprised at how fast the autofocus is on the A600 as well as the rapid fire capabilities in continuous shutter mode. The first photo from the A7RII I previewed in Adobe Lightroom, when looking at the detail I immediately shot off this comment to my friend who I had done the test with:
Hey, I can see inside your eyeball through your sunglasses!
Zubair’s eyeball shot through his sunglasses
Regarding the Sony zoom lens, personally I tend to shy away from zooms, and for the most part I regard kit lenses as trash. However in this case the kit zoom, which I was included with my Sony Nex video camera, is widely regarded as actually being a pretty decent lens. I was also surprised at how much it costs by itself – I guess while my Nex 1080p video camera is now collecting dust (both my iPhone and my A7RII are now my go-to video cameras, as they shoot beautiful video in 4K), in retrospect I guess it was a pretty good deal since the lens is still quite usable and future-proof.
Lightroom settings
For the most part I tried to leave the images untouched in post, to minimize optimizations on a per image basis. However there are some standard things I always do, including for these:
Lens corrections / lens profile. For the first time LR actually recognized the Canon lens on the Sony body by default. Thank you, Adobe.
White balance
Noise reduction bumped from zero to thirty. Just something I do with the A7RII, because I can, I did it with the A6000 as well in this case.
Resources
If you want to learn more about mirrorless cameras or the Sony alpha series, check out these podcasts:
