In May of 2023 I reviewed a lens that I was very excited about. Viltrox had released a next level 16mm F1.8 autofocus lens for Sony FE, and it fill a niche previously unfilled on FE – a high quality, fast prime lens at 16mm…and even better, it was very affordable. That lens has sold a lot of copies over the past few years on first Sony FE and then Nikon Z, but its time in the spotlight may be coming to an end. Sony has now released their answer to the Viltrox, and it is smaller, lighter, wider, and even higher performing…and only costs about $220 more. The new Sony FE 16mm F1.8 G takes the formula that I loved in the FE 20mm F1.8 G and takes it wider. The 16mm F1.8 G is a lens that I quickly fell in love with…and we’ll explore the reasons why in both the video review and the text review shared here.

https://youtu.be/Jbr4zILTipg

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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. You can visit the product listing page for the 16mm F1.8 G here.

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I got two lens loaners from Sony in March of 2025, and they are definitely what you would call two extremes! Here’s what the 16mm G and the 400-800mm G look like side by side:

Ummm, wow! And while that may exaggerate how small the 16mm F1.8 G is, here’s a look at it side by side with the Viltrox:

So yes, it is definitely compact. But that doesn’t mean much if it also isn’t good. We’ll explore the answer to that question in this review.

Build and Handling

Sony’s G series hits what I consider to be a sweet spot for their lenses. These lenses are typically well made, have a good set of features, perform well optically, but, perhaps most importantly, are reasonably priced.

I’ve really felt like the 20mm F1.8 G has been one of Sony’s underrated gems since its release. It had the misfortune to release just about the time that the COVID 19 pandemic went global, which probably muted its introduction. The 16mm F1.8 G should have no such issues, and I suspect this should be a very popular lens for Sony long term.

16mm is a wide focal length, allowing you to get a lot in the frame, but it isn’t so extreme as to become more difficult to compose with like 14mm or wider lenses. What I found as I compared the Sony to the Viltrox in a variety of tests was that the Sony is actually a fair bit wider than the Viltrox. Take a look at this comparison:

That’s a pretty significant difference. I went and looked at the listing for both lenses, and sure enough, the Sony’s specification is 107° while the Viltrox is rated at 105.6°. A good rule of thumb in this day of high resolution cameras is that wider is better. It’s easy to crop in a bit, but much harder to crop out!

So how small is the 16mm F1.8 G?

The answer is pretty small. It is just 73.8mm (2.91″) in diameter and 75mm (3″) in length. It weighs in at a lightweight 304g, or 10.7oz, making it a full 246g less than the Viltrox. I love high quality lenses that also manage to be very small, as it means that they are far more likely to go into my bag when I’m planning for a trip or excursion. I don’t mind shooting with big lenses if I’m staying close, but small and light is better if I’m traveling.

The front filter size is 67mm, which I love, as it is shared with perhaps more lenses than any other on Sony (thanks in large part to Tamron making it their standard).

You may not be able to see it, but that front element also has a fluorine coating, which is part of the weather sealing in the design. There is a small gasket at the lens mount, and then, according to Sony, a variety of other seal points throughout the lens. I count a total of ten seals according to the diagram.

That’s fantastic, as wide angle lenses are often going to be used for capturing landscapes. Going out into the world means sometimes facing moist or dusty environments, and the 16mm F1.8 G is equipped to survive them.

There is also a robust set of features on this compact lens. The first is Sony’s comprehensive approach to aperture control.

This includes the ability to use the aperture iris with clicks (one third stop detents) or in a declicked fashion.

What’s more, unluck some inexpensive lenses that sport the ability to declick the aperture, you can in fact do smooth aperture racks for video without any visible steps (that’s true of the Viltrox as well).

There is a firm detent between F 22 (minimum aperture) and “A” (Automatic mode”, but if you prefer to lock into or out of the aperture ring, there is an iris lock.

I noted while doing the aperture rack that specular highlights stay nice and round due to 11 aperture blades. Here’s a look at F2.8 (I can actually still see decent sized specular highlights at F2.8 due to the high magnification of the lens).

The 16mm F1.8 G also sports a function/custom button (function is set in the camera) along with an AF | MF switch on the left side.

I love all of these control points on this compact lens, as these physical controls allow you to stay more connected to the shot and out of the camera menus.

The manual focus ring works fairly well. The damping is on the light side, but I was able to successfully do smooth focus pulls and some precision focusing for formal tests.

A shallow, petal shaped hood is included. It’s nothing fancy, but it also doesn’t flare out wide, making it easy to reverse for storage without adding a lot of addtional room. There is no lock, but it bayonets on with good precision and a tight “click” when locked into place.

One area of clear advantage for the Sony over the Viltrox is in maximum magnification. The Sony can autofocus as closely as 15cm and achieve a maximum magnification of 0.25x, but you can manually focus a little closer (13cm) and get an ever higher 0.30x magnification. The Viltrox, by comparison, has a MFD of 27cm, and a much lower level of magnification around 0.10x.

As you can see, this also means that you will be able to blur out a background much more strongly with the Sony than the Viltrox as well.

The downside is that you have to pretty much be right on top of your subject at that distance. If the lens is is 7.5cm, and the sensor is a little further back (we’ll call it a total of 9cm), that means that there is just 4cm between the front of the lens and the subject. You’ll need to remove the hood to give yourself any chance of not shading the subject with the lens and/or hood.

Sony does this be employing floating elements in the design of the 16mm F1.8 G, so when the lens is powered off you will feel a slight clunk if you tip the lens up and down as those non-energized elements move inside. That will go away when you attach the lens to the camera and it is powered on.

You will want to avoid getting too close to subjects that require a flat plan of focuse. This lens (as we will see) has a lot of distortion, and that gets exaggerated up close, resulting in so much field curvature that a two dimensional subject almost looks three-dimensional. Check out my test chart result!

You may see some of that with three dimensional subjects, but it probably won’t be anywhere near this pronounced. Just know that there are few caveats in the close-up performance. I’m still glad it has the option, however, as it expands the usefulness of the lens.

The bottom line is that this is a great package. Compact, lightweight, feature rich, weather sealed, and handles great. I immediately loved it.

Autofocus for Stills

Sony has employed dual XD linear motors to work in concert and drive the focus group. Sony has done perhaps a better job than any other lens maker in making sure that their lenses have plenty of autofocus thrust to ensure that you are going to get top-tier autofocus performance.

Focus is silent and near instant. There is no lag between focus on a close or distant subject. Focus happens essentialy instantly and without any drama.

Wide angle lenses like this often don’t put huge stresses on focus systems, as the difference between nothing being in focus and everything being in focus is often very small, but the 16mm F1.8 G proved very capable of quick and acurate focus changes.

Eye tracking in either my formal focus tests or real world results were consistently excellent, though note that eye tracking only really works at close focus distances. Too far away and soon the eye and then even the face won’t occupy a big enough area in the frame for dedicated tracking. It doesn’t matter, however, as at that point everything will be in focus if the focus is even on the body of the subject.

One key advantage of buying a first party lens is the simple fact that you unlock the full potential of Sony’s full autofocus potential and burst options. When shooting on a camera like my Alpha 1, for example, I can shoot at 30FPS rather being limited to 15FPS with a third party lens. For someone with an a9III, that difference becomes even more extreme.

This is a great autofocus system that is ready for whatever subjects you throw at it.

Video AF

Sony is extremely good at calibrating their focus for both stills and video, and that’s true here. That instantaneous focus speed is detuned just enough to make autofocus focus pulls a little more cinematic. Focus breathing is low, allowing focus pulls to be smooth and not eye catching.

I also saw good performance in my hand test, though there was at least one cycle where focus stayed on my face rather than moving to my hand, even though the hand was dominating the frame.

I had a clip where Nala scurried towards the camera, and focus largely kept up with her (though more at her neck rather than eye level), so I would need to tweak the focus speed in settings to really keep up. I don’t doubt there is sufficient thrust in the lens focus motors to accomplish that, however. Here’s a few screen grabs from that clip.

Static shots (landscape type clips) were nice and stable, without any microadjustments. Footage looks nice and crisp. The issues with distortion that we will visit in the image quality section are not an issue with video because Sony’s correction profiles will eliminate them.

Autofocus is great for either stills or video work.

Image Quality Breakdown

Sony has equipped this little lens with a fairly complex optical design. It has 15 elements in 12 groups, which is the same as the Viltrox lens. Included in this design are seven different exotic elements, including AA (advanced aspherical), apsherical, Super ED (Extra Low Disperation), and ED elements. the MTF chart shows an extremely sharp center at F1.8, with good mid-frame and above average corners.

I created a chart comparing the MTF results from the Sony and Viltrox lenses, and found that while both lenses are very sharp, the Sony is sharper across pretty much the whole frame. The advantage at F1.8 (left sides of each chart) only grows when both lenses are stopped down to F8 (the right side value). I put a bold red line through 80% on both charts and you’ll see that more of the sharpness performance is above that line for the Sony.

The FE 16mm F1.8 G has a lot of optical advantages and one major weakness. That weakness is NOT sharpness; this is an extremely sharp little lens.

Let’s cover that major weakness first. The 16mm F1.8 G suffers from a MASSIVE amount of barrel distortion. This is clearly the area where the engineers compromised to produce a lens this compact, as both the quantity and complexity of the distortion is quite bad.

I needed to use a massive +30 to correct the barrel distortion, but even then the results are pretty terrible due to a very complex mustache-pattern effect that results in uneven correction. There is, in fact, more distortion after correction than what the Viltrox has with no correction.

It’s a good thing this lens has access to first party software profiles to help electronically correct things. There isn’t a profile available yet in Lightroom for the RAW images, but I grabbed a JPEG that received in-camera correction, and it looked like this:

Even Sony’s own correction profile doesn’t cover things perfectly, but it definitely looks better. If you don’t have corrections employed, you will DEFINITELY see this distortion.

So is this a dealbreaker? Probably not. Here’s a look at the same shot with an uncorrected RAW on the left and the in-camera corrected JPEG on the right. The latter has been well enough corrected that I doubt it will cause any problems.

If this were a third party lens with less than perfect profile support, I’d be concerned, but it’s probably not too big of a deal with a first party lens.

Vignette is actually not a real issue at all, with only a +52 required in my manual correction (about two stops). That’s impressive in a lens that is so compact, particularly when I consider that the Viltrox has a much larger front element (77mm vs 67mm filter sizes) and yet has double the vignette. If you look at an uncorrected RAW from both, you can clearly see their flaws.

Most of the time LoCA (Longitudinal Chromatic Aberrations) isn’t really an issue with wide angle lenses because depth of field tends to be pretty deep. That’s a little less true of the 16mm F1.8 G because it is capable of focusing much closer than most lenses in this class, but I didn’t really notice much of an issue with fringing in my chart tests.

I also didn’t notice an issue with lateral style aberrations near the edges of the frame. Transitions from black to white are largely unmarred by any fringing.

Lateral CA is far more common on wide angle lenses, and I really hate it because it often messes with edge performance even after correction, but fortunately I saw zero real world issues with LaCA. You can see that the bare branches at the edge of the frame in this deep crop show no issues with fringing.

So yes, the barrel distortion is very unfortunate, but fortunately these other areas are all areas of strength.

So how about resolution? You’ve probably already concluded that this is going to be an area of strength. Crops in this section will be from my test chart shown below, which I’ve tested on using my Sony a7RV and its 61MP of resolution. Crops are shown at roughly 200%.

And here are the F1.8 crops from the center, mid-frame, and lower right corner:

You can see a very nice degree of consistency, with an extremely sharp center and center performances, though we can see that the stretching in the extreme corners does detract a little from the extreme edge performance.

If we check in with the Viltrox, there are a few informative conclusions. First of all is the fact that the Sony is a bit sharper in the center of the frame (as the MTF suggests) and also that it delivers a slightly brighter image despite its compact size.

That advantage carries into the mid-frame, where the Sony is noticeably sharper and has superior contrast.

But the amount of corrections needed on the Sony do compromise its corner performance a bit. The Viltrox shows an advantage there with remarkably sharp corners for being F1.8:

Real world images have fantastic “bite” to them and there’s a bit more real-world contrast for the Sony than what I see on the Viltrox.

Here’s a real world shot at F1.8 that shows both great center sharpness but still quite good sharpness at the edge of the image…even on a 61MP camera.

Stopping down to F2 bring a tiny bit more contrast, with a bit more available at F2.8. Corners are looking fairly crisp now.

The real jump in the corners comes in the F4-F8 zone, where they now look excellent. Here’s a look at how much better the upper left corner is at 200% at F5.6 (right) compared to F2.8 (left).

Real world images taken at these aperture settings will just look awesome.

After F11 diffraction will start to soften the image, with F22 (minimum aperture) looking considerably softer than F11:

So yes, this is an extremely sharp wide angle lens.

We wouldn’t normally talk about bokeh with a 16mm lens, but the high magnification level of the 16mm F1.8 G means that you will be able to get backgrounds blurred out to some degree if you’re very close to your subject. Bokeh isn’t amazingly creamy or anything, but doesn’t look bad, either.

Here’s the bokeh in my barrel sauna if I put a bucket in the foreground.

Sony has great coatings, and they are extra important on a wide angle lens like this. The 16mm F1.8 G does a strong job of rejecting flare artifacts, delivering good contrast and minimal ghosting when pointed at the sun. I’ve raised the shadows in these images to make sure no ghosting artifacts are hiding there. First shot is F1.8, second F11, third F6.3.

The third image has the most of a glare pattern, and that seems to be at least somewhat related to the aperture, as I have the same composition wide open, and it has far less obvious ghosting.

The Sony has slightly less flare artifacts than the Viltrox, and, while the sunstars are very similar, I do slightly favor those on the Sony because the blades keep a little more definition.

Colors seem to be slightly cool on the Sony lens than on the Viltrox. I gave some comparison images the same white balance, but even then there are slight nuances in colors. I’ll let you decide what you prefer.

Finally, let’s take a look at coma. This could prove a very popular lens for shooting stars and the night sky. The low vignette is a big asset here, as it means that you won’t be getting a ton of extra noise in the edge where the vignette has to be corrected. This lens isn’t free from coma, though the results aren’t bad, either. The third crop shows the crucial corner performance, and you can see tha the stars have become more like flying angels. I’ve seen worse…and I’ve seen better.

The Viltrox shows very slightly less coma, but also more noise in the corners because of all the additional vignette that needs correcting. You’ll have to decide which you prefer.

All told, this is a good lens optically with just one major flaw. Check out the image gallery to see more photos from the lens.

Conclusion

I’m of the firm opinion than F1.8 lenses hit the sweet spot for wide angle lenses. F1.4 lenses are always “sexier”, but to me really fast maximum apertures are less necessary in a wide angle lens where one will ofter stop down anyway. A 16mm lens is pretty easy to handhold, so having an F1.4 aperture isn’t really ncessary for keeping the ISO down, either. Sigma’s (excellent) 20mm F1.4 DN weighs over twice as much and is 50% longer despite being fairly compact for an F1.4 wide angle. The Sony FE 16mm F1.8 G will make you wonder why carrying a larger lens is necessary, as it delivers great looking images and is generally a delight to carry and use.

I don’t love the trend of relying on software corrections to finish the job optically, and the amount of barrel distortion here is a bit disappointing. At the same time I’m a little more understanding when a lens is this compact. I recognize that there has to be some kind of tradeoffs for producing such a small lens, and I would rather have the need for software corrections of distortion than having a soft lens.

I’ve referenced the Viltrox AF 16mm F1.8 FE a lot during this review, as it is the most natural comparison for the Sony (and I happen to own it). But I’ll have to confess that this Sony is making me definitely consider selling my Viltrox and acquiring the Sony. It’s small size in particular is very compelling. $800 is not an inexpensive price, but that is $100 cheaper than what the similar FE 20mm F1.8 G sells for. I would probably choose the 16mm over the 20mm, myself, mostly for the simple reason that it is easy to crop in on today’s high resolution cameras, but you can’t always step back to put more in the frame. Kudos to Sony for managing to produce such a desirable little lens despite having a massive existing catalog. I guess there still is room for innovation!

Stay tuned at my YouTube channel, as I will soon have a direct head to head comparison video between the Viltrox and Sony which really highlights the comparitive strengths and weaknesses of both.

Pros:

• Extremely compact lens
• Very feature rich
• Thorough weather sealing
• Handles great
• Aperture racking possible
• Dual linear motors provide instant AF
• Video AF works well
• Low vignette
• Extra wide!
• Extremely sharp
• Excellent contrast
• Good flare resistance
• Good colors
• Much higher magnification than competing lenses

Cons:

• Very strong barrel distortion
• Close up performance has a lot of field curvature
• A bit of coma astigmattism in the corners

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GEAR USED:

Purchase the Sony FE 16mm F1.8 G @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Sony Canada | Camera Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany

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Purchase the Sony a7RV @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

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Purchase the Sony a7IV @ B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Camera Canada | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada | Amazon UK | Amazon Germany 

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Purchase the Sony Alpha 1 @ Camera Canada | B&H Photo | Adorama | Amazon | Sony Canada | Amazon Canada |  Amazon UK | Amazon Germany | Ebay 

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