Fred Miranda Offline Admin Upload & Sell: On
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First Impressions:
When the box from Sony arrived and I peeled it open, for a second I thought about how excited all the Sony shooters are going to be about this.
My initial thoughts on this native full frame 135mm f/1.8 lens are: - It’s noticeably heavier and longer than my other portrait lens, the FE 85/1.4 GM.
- Operational buttons and switches you expect from the GM line - but stiffer to adjust.
- Two custom buttons instead of just one - great for using the lens in portrait or landscape orientation.
- Awesome aperture ring – facilitating easy adjustments to the aperture without touching the camera.
- Manual focus - linear, and precise.
- Weight - a bit front heavy (1030g with the hood attached – my measurement) tipping the scales at my max weight to handhold for the day.
- Hood – makes a noticeable difference preventing veiling flare.
- Four focusing motors inside – surprisingly silent, and faster than ever.
- Weather sealed – ready for the elements.
The Sony 135mm f/1.8 GM is a new member of G Master line and if you shoot portraits, weddings, events, or low light sports, you’re going to want to take note. Sony knew that superior Eye AF and fast action tracking was crucial to the success of this lens and therefore designed the Sony FE 135mm f/1.8 GM with XD linear motors, a technology first introduced on their FE 400/2.8 GM super telephoto lens. However, in the case of the 135/1.8 GM, Sony goes above and beyond - designing it with Dual XD linear motors for the front and rear elements.
See illustration:
You can go, back and forth with the FE 135/1.8 GM's autofocus, blurry to sharp - as quiet as a mouse.
Putting it into perspective, this is a pretty impressive feat considering these motors are moving fairly large elements and the lens features a floating element design (FLE). I don't mind shooting with manual lenses but when I need AF, I want it to work with consistency and speed, and the practically silent shooting comes as a bonus. After a couple days of exclusively using the 135/1.8 GM, it’s going to be hard to un-glue it from my hands, and get back to reality. Which means I'll have to re-mount one of my other great lenses, like the 50/1.4 ZA or 85/1.4 GM which clearly don't share the new and efficient motor technology.
The FE 135mm f/1.8 GM features an unusual large extreme aspherical element (XA) placed towards the front of the lens right behind 2 extra-low dispersion elements. My initial tests show this optical design effectively minimizes color and spherical aberration which results in very high resolution and contrast across the image field while still providing smooth rendering for the background and foreground bokeh. Sony's XA lens elements are molded with high surface precision which in turn practically eliminates optical imperfections like onion-ring pattern in specular highlights. I was hard-pressed to even find even traces of it with this lens.
The lens shares many features found in other G Master primes like custom buttons, MF/AF button, aperture ring (de-clickable) and a three position focus range limiter. It worth noting that the buttons and switches do feel a bit stiffer compared to other GM lenses probably to help avoid accidental setting changes. Manual focusing the 135/1.8 GM feels like operating a mechanical helicoid lens even though it's still fly-by-wire. This is nothing new for GM lenses but I found that the linear MF response seems improved compared to other Sony lenses.
A full frame 135mm f/1.8 lens could never be a small optic by any measure even if designed for mirrorless cameras. It's true that wide angle lenses can be designed to be more compact taking advantage of the shorter flange distance from mirrorless bodies but that's not possible with normal or telephoto lenses. The 135mm f/1.8 GM is not light at 950g (1030g with hood) but when compared to the Sigma 135/1.8 E-mount or other fast 135mm lenses adapted to Sony, it's actually significantly lighter and better balanced in comparison.
There's no optical image stabilization (OSS) in the lens itself, but when testing the lens with the Sony A7R III featuring IBIS (in body image stabilization), I was able to handhold the lens and get sharp results up to 4 stops (~1/10s). For still portraits, I could set shutter speed to 1/60s and get very sharp eyelashes on most of my images.
My initial impressions are certainly very positive regarding image quality and rendering. Even wide open, the lens is able to capture the finest detail in landscapes at infinity across the field as well as very sharp eye-lashes in close to mid-distance portraits. There is noticeable vignetting from wide open until about f/4 but as a dedicated portrait lens, I think that vignetting wide open is actually not a negative and if needed could be corrected in-camera or in-post. Lateral and axial CA is minimal and somewhat difficult to spot in my images.
Optical vignetting is practically unavoidable for a fast full frame 135mm lens so there will be cat-eye shape bokeh at mid-frame and corners. This is an area the FE 85/1.4 GM fares better. But, I have never tested another fast 135mm lens that performed any better in this respect. Stepping the lens down to f/2.8 makes specular highlights appear more rounded across the field.
Wide open, there is a slight field curvature at infinity distance but this is completely masked when stopping the lens down a bit. If you’re a landscape photographer and you’re striving for the ultimate IQ without lugging around a heavy zoom like the 100-400 GM, the 135 GM is a great alternative - even though there are other lighter options like the Batis 135/2.8 APO which would lighten your load even more, around 300g of weight, without sacrificing quality.
Testing for this lens has just started so stay tuned for updates on this thread. For now, let's start with a resolution/contrast test at infinity distance...
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