One of the things that I perhaps hear most often in the chatter in my YouTube video comments or in message chats is the desire for faster zoom lenses. Yes, of course, the uninformed would always love to have a 15-400mm F1.4 full frame zoom that costs $500 and weighs 500g, despite the unfortunate reality that none of this is physically possible. More realistic, however, is the notion of an F2 zoom, so long as you keep the focal ranger fairly constrained. We saw a good example of this with the Sigma 28-45mm F1.8 zoom earlier this year, and, of course, Canon was an early leader with the release of the RF 28-70mm F2L lens, a behemoth of a lens weighing 1430g and costing over $3000. Despite these factors demand has remained high for the lens. Sony has entered the conversation with their most recent lens, the Sony FE 28-70mm F2 G Master. They have managed to do a little better than Canon with a lens that is smaller (11%), lighter (36%), and cheaper (a still expensive $2899 USD). Is this new premium zoom worth getting? You can watch the video review below or just keep reading.

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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.

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Lenses like this prove to be very popular with portrait and wedding photographers. Why? Because that faster maximum aperture allows you to have much better low light performance and produce shots with much shallower depth of field than what an F2.8 lens can achieve. F2 is a full stop faster than F2.8, meaning that you need half as much light with an F2 lens. You can get more “prime-like” shots with lenses like this.

There really aren’t any direct competitors to a lens like this. There are some interesting faster zooms now, like Tamron’s 35-150mm F2-2.8 VXD combines a very short portion of the zoom at F2 with a killer focal range, and Sigma’s 28-105mm F2.8 DN expands the traditional range for an F2.8 standard zoom. But outside of the wider Sigma 28-45mm zoom, there’s nothing that covers the standard zoom range like this with a constant fast aperture like this.

It doesn’t hurt that the Sony 28-70 GM is optically exceptional. It’s not cheap, obviously, but I suspect that it will become a pretty big hit nonetheless, as this is the kind of lens that you could replace multiple primes with and still be very happy. Let’s take a closer look at the details.

Build and Handling

No one who really understands lens design would expect this lens to be small and light, and that’s a good thing, because it isn’t! Yes, it is both smaller and considerably lighter than the Canon equivalent, but this is a still a very good sized lens. It is 92.9mm (3 3/4″) in diameter and is 139.8mm (5 5/8″) in length. It will extend a very small additional amount (about 10mm) when zoomed to the 70mm position.

The weight is substantial at 918g (32.4oz), but that figure is actually pretty good when you remember that Sigma had a DSLR era lens in 2015 that was a 24-35mm F2 and weighed a whopping 941g. With current technology I would say that figure is pretty remarkably low for this kind of lens. The lens does look pretty robust when mounted on a camera, particularly considering that none of Sony’s camera bodies are very big.

A lens like this needs a very large front entrance pupil (a big front element), so that means that the lens will require hefty 86mm front filters, which do tend to be a little more expensive than smaller, more common filter sizes.

Sony’s GM lenses have always been feature rich, though their recent standard has added a couple of new features that are present here and were missing on the previous lens. A lot of the GM features are designed around aperture control in an attempt to make lenses useful for both photo and video capture. There is an aperture ring that gives you the option of having clicks at one third aperture stops, with full stops marked on the aperture ring.

You can also choose a declick option from a switch on the lower right side of the lens, and this will allow you to smoothly move through the aperture without any preset stops. This is most useful for doing aperture racks during video.

There is also the inclusion of an “Iris Lock” switch that will allow you to either lock into or out of the manual aperture ring. Some people prefer using the aperture ring and don’t want to mistakenly go past F16 (minimum aperture) and into the “Auto” position. This might be most common when doing aperture racks. Other people don’t particularly like using an aperture ring, and the iris lock can assure that they don’t get inadvertently bumped into the manual aperture ring.

Moving a little further up the barrel and you’ll find an AF | MF switch along with two Focus Hold/Function buttons whose function can be defined in camera. One button is on the left side of the barrel, and the other on top to allow a button to be close to hand whether shooting in landscape or portrait orientation.

The aperture iris itself has eleven rounded blades, ensuring that specular highlights remain rounded when the aperture is closed down.

Here’s a look at specular highlights with the lens stopped down to F2.8:

Eleven blades will produce a 22 bladed sunstar when stopped down, which looks fairly good to my eye.

The zoom ring is large and ribbed, with a rubberized ring. Zoom action is nicely executed, with precise zooming that doesn’t hang anywhere. What’s interesting, however, is that they’ve employed a Smooth | Tight switch that I’ve never seen outside of long telephoto zooms. This gives you two different responses for the damping of the zoom ring. Smooth will give you quicker, lighter zoom action, while tight works nicely if you want to hold a certain focal length or prevent zoom creep.

Focus happens internally, which helps the lens to function better on a gimbal as the balance remains constant. The zoom extension is also small enough that it doesn’t really change the balance point.

The manual focus ring has a linear response (focus distances will be repeatable), though I find the damping on the ring itself to be too light. There isn’t a lot of feel during manual focus, and thus it doesn’t feel like a true manual focus emulation to me. This is a consistent complaint of mine with GM lenses.

·The 28-70 GM has a thorough weather sealing including rear gasket, internal seals on all seams, buttons, and switches, and a fluorine coating on the front.

It comes with a nylon lens pouch along with a lens hood that has a lock along with a window to allow you access to rotate filters easily.

The minimum focus distance is 38cm across the zoom range, so you’ll get your highest level of magnification (0.23x) at 70mm.

This is a high enough figure to do a lot of useful things.

The body itself is a mixture of metal and engineered plastics, and has the typical GM satin finish that has very light flocking.

All in all, this is another premium GM lens that is loaded with features. It’s a big, expensive lens, but in the realm of the competition for the lens, its worth noting that Sony has worked to keep the size, weight, and price lower than the competition while offering even more features and performance.

Autofocus and Video

One of the key areas of focus for Sony at the moment is engineering their lenses to keep up with the stupendous speed of bodies like the a9III, which can rip out as much as 120FPS for stills and of course cameras that are filming at 120 and even 240FPS. Lenses like this one with extremely large, heavy elements have rarely been valued for their focus speed in the past, but Sony has unlocked a winning formula for achieving extremely fast focus speeds even in lenses like this. The solution? Not one, not two, not three, but four XD (extreme dynamic) linear motors are deployed to enable focus that is fast enough to keep up with even high speed focus situations.

Whereas a lens like this might work fine for portraits or similar speed work in the past, the 28-70 GM is well suited for much faster action than that.

I shot some bursts of Nala in the environment above, but the problem in this setting is that there really wasn’t much contrast between here and the scene (she camouflaged too well), so there are some missed shots in my action sequences here. To be fair, however, the AI in Lightroom can’t even identify a subject in these photos to create a mask, which tells you that the camera AI would have a similar issue.

On the basketball court, however, there was much better contrast, and I had no problem keeping up with players in motion.

I had excellent pinpoint accuracy is shooting narrow depth of field shots.

In a church setting I had zero issues getting accurate focus on the speaker whether they were looking towards the camera or in profile.

And how about portraits? This is perhaps the most important application for a lens like this. At this stage I would be shocked if a GM lens didn’t work great for portraits, and of course it does.

I got flawless results across my portrait session.

As we’ll get to in the section below, this is a lens that is pretty flare prone. Even with the veiling and ghosting, however, focus was perfectly accurate.

Sony also recognizes that the modern mirrorless camera market is a hybrid one. It is just as important that lenses be able to function well in a video environment. First of all, I found that the lens isn’t completely parfocal, though its close enough that you could probably get away with it in a lot of shots (if you were locked into manual focus). If you keep autofocus on, the lens is able to make those microadjustments necessary in such a smooth way that you probably won’t notice autofocus at all. Here’s a frame from the moment where I zoom to 70mm, and it shows accurate focus on the subject.

I’ve been using the lens for my channel (secretly) over the past two weeks, and I’ve had A) perfectly stable focus results in front of the camera and B) great looking footage, with nice color balance and great detail.

My video focus pull test went excellent, with smooth, confident pulls back and forth. No pulsing, settling, or steps. I’ll also note that focus breathing is very well controlled even with focus breathing compensation turned off.

I also found that my hand test (where I alternatively block the camera’s view of my face with my hand and then move it out of the way) stood out as being particularly good. Focus transitions from my hand to my face and back were very smooth, and the minimal focus breathing makes those focus changes almost undetectable. There’s nothing jarring or abrupt, but rather the subject smoothly changes. This would be a great lens for interview style shots where you move from one subject to another.

Focus breathing is well controlled for a longer focal length. I also found that real world transitions from one subject to another were well damped. They are fairly quick, but not abrupt. They have a reasonably cinematic feel to them, and the low focus breathing helps those transitions to not feel jarring.

Real world focus changes were excellent, allowing for fairly cinematic looking focus pulls that are not far off what you could achieve with a good manual pull. I’m very impressed with the overall performance of this lens in the autofocus department.

Image Quality Breakdown

Obviously designing a lens like this takes some incredible engineering to pull it off successfully. The optical design is quite complex, with 20 elements in 14 groups. That includes 3 extreme aspherical (XA) elements (the most ever in any Sony design), 3 Super ED elements, 3 aspherical elements, and 1 ED element. That’s a lot of fancy glass, but it clearly has paid off. Since I am doing this review ahead of public release, things like the MTF chart are not yet available, but I have seen one in a Sony briefing, and it looks pretty fantastic.

This is a very high resolution lens, producing highly detailed images that hold up even at high levels of magnification. I shot primarily on a 61MP a7RV body, and this was one of those lenses whose images look good when viewed full screen…and then exceptionally good when you zoom in 100%!

More importantly to me, I think Sony has done a pretty great job of correcting various aberrations while not completely eradicating the character of the lens. This is a lens that does an amazing job of resolving the fine details with great microcontrast:

But it also produces images that just look good even when you aren’t getting lost in the details!

There’s a reason why lenses like this start at 28mm rather than 24mm. 28mm is much easier to engineer, and if they went to 24mm (and F2), the lens would be A) much larger and heavier and B) much more optically compromised. Keeping things at 28mm on the wide end allowed them to keep distortion under control. Here’s a look at how the lens handles vignette and distortion at 28mm:

There’s a moderate amount of barrel distortion, requiring a +8 to correction. Vignette is actually extremely low, requiring just a +15 to correct. That’s really low for a lens like this. All it takes is a look at a lens like the Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DN II to realize how low the vignette and distortion is here, but that’s at 28mm rather than 24mm, of course.

How about on the telephoto end of things?

There’s a tiny amount of pincushion distortion that is just a bit complex (-3 to correct), and again extremely low vignette (+16 to correct). The vignette figures in particular are surprisingly low for a lens like this, running several stops less than what we see on the Canon RF 28-70mm F2L.

That’s a great start.

I also found that longitudinal chromatic aberrations (LoCA) were well controlled, with minimal color fringing before or after the plane of focus.

It’s not that there is nothing there, but I found that in real world usage the lens showed solid control of aberrations, and that allows for really great microcontrast.

It’s the same thing that we saw in the dried wildflowers earlier. Just really, really impressive microcontrast.

The same was true of lateral chromatic aberrations (LaCA) that show up near the edges of the frame in transition zones. I see a clean transition from black to white near the edge of the frame here.

Another strong performance.

How about resolution? I’m using a 61MP Sony a7RV here and will show results at or near 200% magnification levels. Here’s a look at the test chart that the crops will come from:

And here at the F2 crops at 28mm from the center, mid-frame, and bottom right corner.

You can see very consistent sharpness from the center out to the very edge of the frame. That’s really impressive.

I found that real world images had very nice looking 3D pop shooting at 28mm F2. This will prove a very nice environmental portrait lens.

The very consistent sharpness across the frame makes it easy to compose in the corners and still get great sharpness and detail.

Such great sharpness at F2 typically means that there isn’t really much room for improvement, and I couldn’t really see a difference stopping down to F2.8. By F4 I can see a bit of improvement in contrast, but mostly in the corners.

Shooting landscapes at 28mm produces beautiful results with fine details rendered all across the frame.

As per usual, diffraction (particularly on high resolution bodies) will start to soften the image by F11. After F11, however, diffraction becomes much more noticeable, with the effects of diffraction being very obvious by the minimum aperture of F22.

At 35mm the results are highly similar save for an improvement in the corners. Here I’ll show the upper left corner, which looks noticeably better, as does the typical lower right corner that I often sample.

There are very few 35mm primes that can compete with that level of performance! Expect your 35mm images to just look great, period.

50mm, if anything, is even more consistently good. Here’s yet another area from the chart, with 35mm F2 on the left, and 50mm F2 on the right.

Here’s a real world shot at 48mm, F2. Just look at the contrast and detail on the very narrow depth of field on the needles.

And that brings us to the critical 70mm point. 70mm at F2 provides a very shallow depth of field and will certainly be a very popular portrait focal length. Does the lens drop off here?

Absolutely not.

Here are the F2 crops from across the frame.

Look at the lens’ ability to render those fine details at F2:

No, sharpness is never going to be a problem with this lens. It is one of the sharpest zooms I’ve ever tested all across the zoom range. It is flawlessly usable at F2 at any focal length; you can essentially just use aperture for controlling depth of field. You’ll never need it for additional sharpness.

Whether shooting landscapes, portraits, or art shots, you’ll find fantastic sharpness and contrast throughout.

To be frank, though, I didn’t anticipate any issues with sharpness in a modern Sony GM lens. They truly have been the Gold Masters when it comes to resolution over the past 4 years. My bigger concern was if the lens would be so overcorrected as to lose its soul. Fortunately I didn’t come away feeling like that at all. This lens has quite beautiful rendering.

I showed the 28mm framing of this scene earlier, but here’s a look at a familiar fern at 70mm, F2:

Here’s another shot that I felt was quite artful in the rendering.

This shot is a little further away, and while I do see a slight bit of “nervousness” in the transition zone, I think the 3D pop on the subject is really nice.

Specular highlights also look quite nice (shown here at F2.8).

Color rendition was nice as well, with nicely saturated colors with a neutral white balance.

The reds were really rich after a rain here.

I had an opportunity very early one morning to test for coma. Star points stay consistent across the frame, with next to no coma. Very nice performance!

It looks good at 70mm, too.

Flare resistance is the only weak link I can point to. The 28-70 GM has a surprising amount of ghosting artifacts, whether at wide apertures (F2 here):

…or at smaller apertures (F11 here):

You can see a bit fewer ghosting artifacts in this shot of autumn leaves.

You will definitely have to account for this if you want to shoot backlit portraits. It WILL be a factor.

If you want to see more images, check out the image gallery linked here.

Conclusion

Sony shooters have had some jealousy over the Canon RF 28-70mm F2L, but there’s no need of that anymore. They now have a lens that is superior in every way. The Sony FE 28-70mm F2 GM is smaller, lighter, faster focusing, sharper, and even cheaper! This is the lens that will officially make Canon (and Nikon) shooters jealous instead.

The Sony 28-70mm F2 is expensive. It’s big and relatively heavy. But it also could legitimately be that “one lens” for a lot of people.

It has great autofocus, its loaded with features, and it has amazing, amazing image quality.

So if you’ve got the money to buy it and the muscles to carry it, say hello to your new favorite lens. I can see the Sony FE 28-70mm F2 GM going on the camera bodies of certain portrait and wedding photographers and never coming off again.

Pros:

• Smaller, much lighter, and cheaper than Canon RF lens
• Great build quality
• Thorough weather sealing
• Wide range of aperture control options
• Smooth | Tight switch interesting alternative to zoom lock
• Extremely fast autofocus
• Autofocus is smooth and silent
• Extreme precision even with fast moving targets
• Low focus breathing
• Extremely sharp wide open
• Very consistent sharpness across zoom range
• Low fringing
• Extremely low vignette
• Low distortion
• Nice bokeh
• Good coma control

Cons:

• Some flare issues
• Doesn’t have lens based stabilization

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