Today we're going to take a look at Sony's E 50/1.8 lens, one of the newest additions to the Sony NEX lens lineup, and do a quick comparison to one of the best 50mm rangefinder lenses, Carl Zeiss Planar T* 50/2 ZM. The lenses are vastly different in optical construction, build quality, features, but ultimately, both are 50mm primes and can be used on NEX cameras. With the 50mm f/1.8 OSS still being quite hard to come by because of various manufacturing delays that plagued Sony for a few months after the major flood in Thailand, as well as because of the unexpected demand for this lens, users have been resorting to exploring various alternative 50mm lenses. We recently did a couple of such reviews with 8 different rangefinder 50mm lenses (see Alternative 50mm Lenses for NEX), including Zeiss Planar 50/2 ZM. With the final part of that review coming up next week, we will include Sony's 50/1.8 OSS into the group to give you a better idea where the Sony's lens stack up against much more fancy glass. Another comparison but against SLR 50mm lenses will be coming up in mid to late May. But in the meantime, this of this quick test as a preview of things to come. And without dragging things any further, here're our test conditions:

• NEX-7 with v1.0 firmware
• Manual, bracked focusing
• RAW with Adobe RGB color space
• 3m focusing distance
• ISO 400, WB set to Tungsten (2,500K, Tint: 0)
• Adobe ACR with default settings: Blacks +5; Brightness: +50; Contrast +25

A new day and a new quick test. This time around we're gonna take a look at the UWA lenses for the NEX system. Sony E 16/2.8 was one of the first lenses introduced along the NEX cameras and so far is the widest lens available for the E mount. SLR Magic announced that it will start manufacturing its HyperPrime 12mm f/1.8 lens for the NEX camera, but so far it has been just waporware and the lens is not available anywhere in the world. Sigma's 19/2.8 EX DN is the only other wide angle lens for the NEX cameras and marks Sigma's official entrance into the race. We recently saw how well Sigma's other NEX lens, the 30/2.8 EX DN performed against its Sony competitor, the E 30/3.5 Macro, so obviously there is a tremendous interest in the 19mm lens as well. Can Sigma deliver better performance at a better cost again?

Before we begin, and before you flood us with thousands of messages, let's be clear that this is not really an apples to apples comparison - you can't compare a 16mm lens to a 19mm lens. Well, you can - that's what we're doing here obviously, but the comparison is biased in a couple of ways. Firstly, a 16mm lens is wider and hence at the same focusing distance will have different EFOV and different DOF. To solve the EFOV problem, we used a larger target with the 16mm lens, which placed the measurement areas roughly into the same place as with the 19mm lens. But only roughly - we can say that we measured MTF50 in the corners for both lenses, but the points of measurement were different between the two lenses - the variance of 10% in true distance from the image center to the corner points of measurement between the two lenses is quite probable. We can't obviously do anything about the DOF difference, so we just ignored this issue. Secondly, we can't really do anything about the variance in optical characteristics of lenses that can arise due to the difference in the true FL - for example we can't compensate for distortion to measure true resolution, so again, we simply ignore this. But not everything in this test has as much variance - vignetting and lateral CA measurements are, for example, more comparable than say raw MTF50.

Just published new review of Sigma 30/2.8 EX DN on Sony NEX-5n and Sony NEX-7

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Today we're gonna do a quick comparison of Sony'e E 30/3.5 Macro lens against the new kid on the NEX block, Sigma's 30/2.8 EX DN lens. Sigma has just released two dedicated primes for the NEX systems (also available for the m43 platform) and based on the initial feedback from the user community, the new 30/2.8 EX DN is quite a performer. But really, how good of a performer? Let's check it out...

But first thing first. The two lenses are really targeting different segments of users - Sony's lens is a 1:1 macro while Sigma's lens, well, it's just a general purpose lens. If you're even remotely interested in macro photography, this comparison is useless to you - just go get Sony's lens. On the other hand, if you were considering getting Sony as a general purpose prime (given it's EFOV of 45mm, you get a normal-ish lens), than read on - you're the primary target for this review.

New review of Sony Carl Zeiss Sonnar 24/1.8 ZA on Sony NEX-5n and Sony NEX-7