Thursday 27 December 2012

Sony 55-200mm lens

This is one of the most underrated lenses in Sony's 'Alpha' lens line-up in my opinion. It is also unfortunately one of the lenses I most neglect when using my Sony camera. This is only due to the fact I have several other 'Alpha' lenses to consider, some of which I think are more practical in focal length and/or the amount of light they can gather at their largest apertures.

   Back to the lens in question, I find it is a very versatile focal length - provided you have a secondary lens for the perhaps more important shorter focal lengths; for instance the 18-55mm 'kit' lens as well. Either this or you intend to have a photo session where only longer focal lengths will be necessary. If you have these prerequisites met in practise the 55-200 mm performs admirably for a lens the price it is available at.

   The zoom ring is solid feeling but smooth to operate. The same goes for the manual focus ring with a nice amount of torque but not so much as to make it stiff to operate. The lens is sharp. In my experience using it, it remains pleasingly sharp at all apertures and focal lengths. If I were to conduct a more stringent test of the lens against such criteria I'm sure I would find some minor discrepancies but in real-world use it is hard to fault its sharpness, which is important for me in a telephoto lens.

    The lens provides pleasant out-of-focus backgrounds in contrast to sharp closer subjects if you are so inclined at longer focal lengths and so can be used as a portrait lens (for me at least). This is mainly due to the long focal lengths. However it is also partly down to the lens being reasonably fast for its class of telephoto lens; with the lens remaining at f4 maximum aperture for a large duration of its focus rotation.

   My next point would be the focal length range itself. Although it possesses less range or maximum focal length compared to other telephoto zooms I found for my uses and photographic style it was perfectly adequate in this regard. Then there is the fact the lens is cheaper and overlaps better in focal length than other telephotos like the 75-300mm for example.

   One last observation is quite minute I think but might be worth considering. Sony's 'Alpha' system features built-in 'steady shot' in the camera body, rather than in-lens stabilisation. While this may be an advantage in low light conditions and works with any lens (both factors that I value in this form of stabilisation), the stabilisation doesn't show up in the viewfinder, which is the case with in-lens stabilisation. This means as the focal length increases, the view through the viewfinder gets more and more 'choppy'. Although this unstable view isn't too pronounced, it is less so at shorter focal lengths, which was an influence in making me choose this focal length range rather than say 75-300mm.

   Finally, I have the first generation of this lens, which seems to be very similar to the second generation apart from the lack of a manual/automatic focus switch on the lens itself.

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