In addition to the local natural landscape, there are plenty of opportunities for comparative imaging in the supermarket, post office, locker room of the ski area, etc. The trees are right outside, and their needles provide ample fine detail for evaluating image quality. My favorite category for this sort of thing is the Jeffrey and pinyon pines in my neighborhood in the eastern Sierra Nevada of California. Avoiding the Brick Wall when Testing LensesĪlthough I must admit to photographing an Edmunds USAF resolution chart posted in our garage and the office book case and our cat for semi-consistent subject matter to compare lenses, most of my evaluation was based on real-world subjects. There are plenty of possibilities to adapt to the E-mount. Almost all early reports suggest that the Sony FE 35mm lens is a winner, so this report won’t mention lenses longer than 30mm. Many of these lenses were tried simply because I had access to them, not because they had much potential or otherwise seemed like a good idea – just curiosity run amok. In the process, I got carried away and looked at several lenses in the 20-30mm range as well. Nevertheless, we’ll consider it as the “gold standard” for comparison purposes here, and I set about to find out how some other lenses might measure up until the optical engineers at Sony and Zeiss design and produce a really wide lens optimized for the a7R sensor and its presumed successors. The sterling reputation of this lens seems well deserved, by all accounts. The WATE was among those lenses that Michael tested in The World’s Best Sensor Meets the World’s Finest Lenses. And, indeed, a few reports on the net say that they make a pretty good pair. After about three weeks of experimenting with various optics, this report briefly summarizes one photographer’s results from an eclectic mix of wide-angle lenses on the Sony a7R.Įarly conjectures suggested that the optimum wide-angle lens for the a7R might be the Leica Wide Angle Tri-Elmar 16-18-21mm f/4 ASPH lens, often called the WATE in Leica-speak. Once the a7R arrived, the lens collection was put into action via adapters on the new camera. I’ve been fortunate to own a variety of lenses that get used on a Sony NEX-7 and other cameras. So, there has been much speculation and observation reported on the net about which wide-angles would or in fact, actually did work adequately on the a7R. Based on experience with wide-angle lenses and the Sony NEX-7 sensor (e.g., Michael’s A Sony NEX-7 Rolling Review and my Some Wide Angle Options for the Sony NEX Cameras), there was widespread concern that the new Sony full-frame sensors might not work well with compact symmetrical-design wide-angle lenses. In the absence of a native Sony / Zeiss lens wider than the 35mm or 28-70mm FE lenses at the close of 2013, a7R owners immediately began searching for adaptable wide lenses of other makes. One of the big advantages of the Sony E-mount’s short focal-plane-to-flange distance is the opportunity to mount just about any ol’ lens via an adapter. For example, Michael wrote about his experience with seven Leica M lenses on the a7R in The World’s Best Sensor Meets the World’s Finest Lenses. Now that photographers have had the Sony a7R to use for a few weeks, rather than merely to test briefly, more articles about real-world utility are available. User reports have proliferated on various photography forums–-perhaps the most extensive collection is the 157 pages (and counting) on Fred Miranda’s alternative gear forum. Production cameras were released in November, and dozens, if not hundreds, of reviews have been published on-line and in print. As prototypes appeared in selected hands (such as Michael Reichmann’s), “first-impression” style reviews quickly followed (e.g., Sony Alpha 7R Hands On right here at the Luminous-Landscape). The Sony a7R is receiving plenty of well-deserved attention since its announcement in mid-October.
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