CPWarner wrote: GraysonLake1987 wrote:
Sony intentionally designed that way and it's really annoying. The zoom ring will move by itself whenever you aim high or low.
A design flaw.
After using mine a couple weeks, this is not an issue and does not warrant this kind of statement. I personally like that it has a delicate touch to zoom when in the smooth setting where two fingers can zoom it out or back very quickly. I find that I end up with the tripod foot in my palm and use finger tips to zoom back and forth. A very light touch on the zoom ring as I follow something eliminates zoom creep. If you need it to not creep pointing up or down with no hand on the zoom ring, switch to the tight setting and it does not move. The tight setting is only marginally stiffer to turn than with it in the smooth setting. I really don't understand all the drama about this and going as far as calling it a design flaw. If they made it so that it would not creep at all in any setting people would be complaining about how stiff the zoom action was. This is not a real issue.
I have kind of a “both sides” response to this, having used some lenses that suffer from “zoom creep.”
I agree that the lighter touch is a plus, though if I had to choose between that and a slightly less light touch and no zoom creep, I’d prefer the latter. (I suppose that the option to use the stiffer setting in cases where it may be an issue is one solution.)
Zoom creep can be a frustrating problem in some real world situations. With one of my older, non-Sony lenses that had the issue, I didn’t notice it in normal shooting… but putting the camera/lens on the tripod and aiming it down could be extremely frustrating, as I’d have to hold the zoom ring on the tripod-mounted lens, which kind of defeats the purpose of the tripod!
I’m the other hand, I’m still going to be interested to see if this is an issue that affects a few early-release copies and is then fixed in later batches.
Jun 29, 2026 at 04:37 PM
Previous versions of gdanmitchell's message #17063667 « Sony 100-400 F4.5 Internal Zoom Creep ? »
