Sony E 11mm F1.8 Evaluate

Introduction

Ease of Use

The Sony E 11mm F1.8 is a completely weather-sealed, ultra-wide-angle prime lens with a devoted Sony E mount that’s manufactured from steel. Communication between lens and digital camera physique is offered by means of 10 electrical contacts.

Observe nonetheless that as a way to take full benefit of the weatherproofing, you’ll need to mount it on a equally weather-sealed physique, not like the Sony ZV-E10 digital camera that we examined it with.

The weather-proofing evokes confidence that the lens will survive every kind of inclement situations.

Contemplating how small and light-weight it’s, the E 11mm F1.8 lens is sort of nicely constructed, though it is not fairly on a par with the corporate’s costlier G-branded lenses.

Tipping the scales at simply 181 g (6.4 oz.) and measuring 66 x 57.5 mm (2-5/8 x 2-3/8 in.) in diameter and size, the Sony E 11mm F1.8 is a really compact and light-weight ultra-wide-angle prime lens that you could carry round all day with out noticing.

The Sony ZV-E10 used for this check proved to be match for the lens, providing very pleasing steadiness and quick and near-silent auto-focusing.

The E 11mm F1.8 prime’s primary exterior management is the adequately sized focus ring.

You possibly can rapidly and simply use the main target mode change to toggle the perform of the lens between AF and MF.

Guide focusing is finished in a standard style, with the main target ring electronically coupled to the transferring lens parts and working with linear-response, though there are not any onerous stops at both finish. Focusing is totally inside and the 55mm filter thread doesn’t rotate on focus.

With the E 11mm F1.8 lens connected to a Sony ZV-E10 physique, focusing proved to be satisfyingly fast in most conditions because of the Linear Motor system which makes use of two separate motors.

This mixture is able to locking give attention to a topic nearly immediately, even when alternating between shut and faraway topics, and it is just about silent too.

In excessive low-light conditions you might expertise somewhat focus searching on the lengthy finish, though utilizing the quick f/1.8 most aperture largely helps to keep away from this.

This lens doesn’t characteristic built-in picture stabilisation, as an alternative counting on the digital camera physique to provide it, which is able to show irritating for house owners of Alpha digital camera our bodies with out IBIS, once more just like the ZV-E10 that Sony despatched us for testing.

The lens has a customisable focus maintain button which retains the lens locked to the present focusing distance, helpful in case you’re auto-focusing and don’t need the lens to try to discover focus once more. It will possibly additionally, amongst different issues, be usefully set to Eye AF.

Included within the field is a slim petal-shaped lens hood (ALC-SH170), which is straightforward to connect to the lens – merely line up the crimson line with the crimson marking on the lens and twist into place till it clicks. You too can reverse the lens hood for decreasing the general measurement when transporting the lens. This lens accepts 55mm entrance filters.

Focal Vary

The 15mm focal size supplies an angle of view of 104 levels.

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, usually seen as purple or blue fringes alongside contrasty edges, are usually not an excessive amount of of an issue with the Sony E 11mm F1.8 lens, besides in areas of very excessive distinction.

Vignetting

With the lens set to its most aperture of f/1.8, there’s some mild fall-off within the corners, requiring you to cease down by at the very least 3 f-stops to fully stop it.

Distortion

The Sony E 11mm F1.8 does not exhibit very a lot barrel distortion in JPEG recordsdata, as you may see within the photograph beneath, because of in-camera lens distortion controls which might be robotically utilized (and which may’t truly be turned off).

JPEG

It is a completely different story for the Uncooked file, although, which displays heaps of barrel distortion which you will must both right in post-processing or apply a lens profile.

RAW

Sunstars and Flare

The Sony E 11mm F1.8 is able to producing good sunstars when stopped-down to f/16, as proven beneath, though the lens is considerably vulnerable to flare when taking pictures instantly into the solar even with the equipped lens hood fitted.

Macro

The Sony E 11mm F1.8 just isn’t actually a macro lens, but it surely does provide a usefully shut focus level of 15cm when auto-focusing and even nearer 12cm when guide focusing, with a most magnification of 0.13x for AF and 0.20x for MF.

Bokeh

Bokeh is a phrase used for the out-of-focus areas of {a photograph}, and is normally described in qualitative phrases, reminiscent of clean / creamy / harsh and many others.

Sony have paid shut consideration to this side of lens use, using a 7-segment diaphragm with rounded blades, which mixed with the quick most aperture permits for extra pleasing bokeh.

In our view, their efforts have been pretty profitable for a wide-angle prime lens – see the examples beneath to guage for your self.

Sharpness

With a view to present you ways sharp the Sony E 11mm F1.8 lens is, we’re offering 100% crops on the next web page.