I was in a press briefing regarding this lens when the Sony rep said something that resonated with me.  He noted with today’s high resolution bodies (I currently do my Sony reviews on the 61MP a7RV body) that getting length is relatively easy – just crop.  But going wider is a different story.  So Sony is going wider with their most recent standard zoom.  Whereas the typical zoom range is 24-70mm, Sony is going that extra bit wider with the FE 20-70mm F4 G lens, which is just enough to make this a very unique lens – a hybrid wide angle/standard zoom.  The difference between 20 and 24mm is significant for landscape work.  Look at how much more of the building is visible in this comparison:

That can make an even more dramatic difference indoors, allowing you to include a lot more in the frame.

Perhaps most importantly for many photographers, the new 20-70G (as we’ll call it for brevity in this review) goes wide enough that it can serve as the wide angle lens for many photographers, meaning that they need to spend the money on one less lens.  Pairing the 20-70mm F4 with the amazing new 70-200mm F4 Macro G OSS II (my review here) would make for a lightweight, killer combo of lenses with near perfect image quality over what amounts to a 10x zoom ratio.  That’s pretty tempting.  The new 20-70G also makes for a unique travel lens, capable of giving you really wide results:

…but also the ability to zoom in and capture more details, like this:

That zoom ability makes it a reasonable portrait lens (though F4 isn’t exactly a dramatic maximum aperture), delivering crisp results with nice color and decent background blur.

There’s a lot here to attract photographers, particularly since the price point isn’t ridiculous (about $1100 USD).  Are there any hidden fatal flaws here that should keep you from choosing this lens?  You can judge for yourself by either watching my video review below or reading the text review…or just enjoy the photos below.

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Thanks to Sony USA for sending me a review loaner of this lens. As always, this is a completely independent review. *The tests and most of the photos that I share as a part of my review cycle have been done with the Sony a7RV along with the Sony Alpha 1 that serve as my benchmark cameras for Sony lenses.

Photos of the Sony FE 20-70mm F4 G

Photos Taken with the Sony 20-70mm F4 G

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