All right, we got a new lens today.
This is a new 16-35 F4 PZ,
or "Pee Zee" if you're in the US, which stands for power zoom.
So it's a power zoom 16-35 F4.
And I also have the Zeiss 16-35 F4 to compare it against.
As far as disclosure goes, Sony lent me this lens.
This is pre-production.
I don't get to keep it.
This video isn't sponsored by Sony, no money changed hands,
but this video does have a sponsor though,
and that's Storyblocks.
All right, let's jump right into the build quality,
and I guess the zoom function,
and we can talk about these little white tapes
that I have on the lens, so I can take them off.
Fun fact about that, I already did the tape test,
and I had it with two pieces of tape on,
and then there was only one piece of tape on it
when I went to set up for the video.
So I don't know where that went,
but it's probably stuck to me or some piece
of gear somewhere in here.
So we'll find it eventually in the future,
but the reason we'll have these two things,
it just marks the manual focus.
So from here to here is the total focus throw.
So just less than 180 degrees,
I would say probably 160 or so degrees, which isn't bad,
and the focus is completely linear when you manual focus,
which is nice.
And it's not, I wouldn't call it extremely well dampened,
but it's smooth.
So smooth, but light is the feeling of it.
But the zoom ring, so this is what's interesting about it.
So it's focus-by-wire, it's an electronic focus ring,
but it's also an electronic zoom ring now.
And the motors for the focusing,
this is the most interesting thing about this lens,
the motors, you know how Sony has these XD linear motors,
which are, they're almost like hovering on rails,
and they can move back and forth really, really quickly,
and that's how they're able to get the fast autofocus?
Well, now this might be the first zoom lens ever
that they have that does that.
The zoom function is also on those XD linear motors,
which means they're electronically coupled.
So there is no mechanical manual zoom.
If I connect this to the camera and I turn the zoom ring,
nothing happens until the camera is on.
And it's all internal zoom obviously,
but it's the exact same way as like,
think of it like zoom by wire, if you will.
This allows them to have a bunch of cool functions,
like they can control the zoom speed and acceleration,
and a little bit of like the curve almost in software,
on the different cameras.
But the con is that you can't, I guess,
physically zoom it with just the lens,
if that's something you need.
Also, there's the thing--
I haven't actually figured a way to stop this yet,
but when you turn the camera off,
the zoom resets back to 16 mil,
and then you have to zoom back in
because it's like it resets the electronic position of it.
There is an AF/MF switch, a focus hold button,
and then another way to control the zoom here
is there's a zoom lever on the side of the lens,
or you can turn this.
The reason to use the lever is that
it's gonna be controlled by those speed settings,
and you can just press it,
and it will zoom at a constant rate,
where the ring, even though it's electronic
and it's kind of dampened, but it's still how
it's all gonna be based on how well you turn it.
So if you want, just let the machine do it smoothly,
you can just press the lever.
And then it also has an iris ring here that can,
right now it's clicked, but it has the click
on/off switch on it, so we can turn that off.
And then now it will go smoothly through the iris,
and there's an iris lock switch as well.
So if we put the aperture ring all the way over to the
A setting, like that, so the camera controls it,
then we can flick this switch down,
and then we won't be able
to adjust the iris anymore by accident.
So really for the size of this lens,
it's fully loaded with like every sort of switch
and lever and stuff you'd expect to have on it.
And I'm really surprised they're able to stick
that power zoom XD floating rail gun zoom system
into such a small lens, because comparatively,
if we compare it to the Zeiss 16-35,
you can see that the Zeiss is not only taller,
but it feels significantly heavier in the hand.
Actually have the specs on it here.
The new Sony is 353 grams, and the Zeiss is 518 grams.
So it's a pretty significant reduction.
And in case you weren't able to see it there,
it's f/4 to f/22 is the full aperture range.
Now, jumping back to manual focus,
the lens is also parfocal.
I mean, as parfocal as I could see,
I don't know if it's perfectly, but from my tests,
going from 16 to 35, or focusing at 35 and pulling out to 16.
It maintained focus pretty much perfectly,
because if I would go in and try and dial it
in a little bit better with the ring,
it didn't get any better on either end.
So I think it's pretty much truly parfocal,
which is a nice touch.
Actually, let's go ahead,
and I'll give you a little bit of a demo
of the zoom control.
So I'm using the FX3 here,
which has the zoom toggle right here on the front.
But if you're using a non-FX cine camera,
you can program whatever button you want.
You can either program a button to just
bring up zoom control and then use the D-pad,
or you could program left and right on the D-pad
to be zoom in.
And like I said, you can also control,
you can fine tune how it actually zooms.
So, or you could just use it on the lens, too.
But, so here's a little demo here.
Let me press record.
So, if I zoom in,
that's full speed in and out using the rocker,
but if I go and just pull the rocker just a little bit,
you can see that we get very smooth, slow zooming.
And it looks great.
You can see that as I'm zooming,
you don't see the focal length anywhere on the lens.
So with a lens like this, regardless of what
I guess any modern Sony camera that you put it on,
it shows the focal length on the screen.
Something I kind of wish that Sony would do
with all the lenses,
like some brands have it where you can see the focal length
on your display, regardless of what you're doing.
But with Sony, it's only the power zoom lenses
that don't have the focal length on the lens,
then they'll show up on the screen.
But if I put the Zeiss on,
it doesn't show up on the screen
because it's on the lens itself.
And the focus breathing is really well controlled as well,
which I was happy to see.
And this is using even the FX3,
which doesn't have the focus breathing compensation.
With no compensation, the focus breathing is very,
very minimal when you go from infinity to minimum,
so that's great.
And speaking of minimum focus, on this one,
there's quite a disparity between the 16 mil and the 35 mil,
you get about the same distance from the subject.
It's 0.28 meters or 0.92 feet to 0.24 meters or 0.79 feet,
so you can get a little bit closer,
but the magnification is significantly different
between 16 mil and 35.
So if you wanna do the closeup stuff,
you definitely wanna be on 35 mil.
Some shots here of a Rubik's cube so you can see to scale
how close you can get at 35 mil,
and then how close you get at 16 mil.
You can't really get close at all,
even though the lens is close, but because it's so wide.
Now regarding autofocus, compared to manual focus,
it worked well.
I tested it on the a1, which I figure is maybe
our best auto focusing camera for Sony,
and I got great results for photo.
I did the classic sort of keeper test.
I was doing things where I was moving in and out
of a focus target, really quick on high speed
and seeing how many keepers there were.
I don't know how valid of test that is,
but I was getting above 90%.
So I've got no complaints with that, even on high burst.
And then for video autofocus, again,
really, really good result,
but there is a quirk or a piece of advice.
So, typical kind of like running at the camera
back and forth thing, I was getting great results.
But if I did the pop-in-pop-out test where you like,
leave the frame and come back in.
I know that's not really a practical test,
but in case that's something you wanna do,
or maybe you're holding up objects to this lens quickly,
it struggles a little bit when you have the responsiveness
set to anything less than maximum.
I had to put that of five, the switching responsiveness.
Once you put it to five,
then you can do the pop in, pop out.
But if you have a set to four even,
it took longer to acquire me again
than what I would expect to normally see from a Sony.
All right, so now I'm going to boot up the computer
and show you some test shots.
Okay, these first couple shots here are,
one, to compare against the Zeiss,
but also I wanna talk about the lens corrections on or off.
I don't think that there's a distortion correction
for this lens yet, whether in camera or in Lightroom,
'cause if I switch back and forth between it and the Zeiss,
you can see that although they're very similar,
the Zeiss is distortion corrected.
As far as sharpness though, between the two lenses,
you can see on the left is the new power zoom,
that the power zoom is sharper than the Zeiss,
and it also has fewer issues in between the close lines.
You can see over here on the Zeiss that we got some fringing
and some resolution problems here where
we're a little bit crisper and cleaner over here
on the power zoom.
Regarding color rendition though,
both are pretty pure in the grays and the whites.
And I would say both have similar...
Sony, the left,
the power zoom might be a little bit more saturated,
but they're very similar.
Like, I wouldn't really worry too much about color here.
It does seem like the yellow is a little bit better
on the power zoom,
and a little bit richer here in the magenta and the blue.
But, so yeah, it's a better lens.
It's newer, it performs better optically in this regard,
but it's minimal.
One thing to consider though,
before we move on and step away from the comparison
is that the power zoom does not have
any kind of stabilization,
where the Zeiss does have the OSS built in.
Now, I tried to do a comparison here
to see if I could see the difference,
because all the bodies that I have have good IBIS
in the body.
So for like photo, whatever, it's not gonna matter.
But I thought, okay,
what about just holding a shot at 35 mil?
Is it shakier on the power zoom than it is on the Zeiss?
And yes, I guess, but very, very minimal.
I think at this focal length,
it just didn't make a significant difference
like it does on the telephotos.
So I don't know that that would be a determining factor
for me in a buying decision.
I don't think I would buy this for the OSS,
'cause I didn't see a huge, huge difference there.
I would probably buy this instead
for the improved optical quality, which is noticeable,
and jumping back into that chromatic aberration thing.
There is like no chromatic aberration problems
on the new lens, which is great.
Let me show you a couple shots.
So if we punch into like 230% here on the Zeiss,
we can see that there is some of that orange fringing,
some lateral chromatic aberration here on this chart.
But then if we move over to the power zoom,
there's almost none, so that's excellent.
But you can fix that fringing on the Zeiss in Lightroom,
or in post pretty easily.
It's more of the LoCA,
the longitudinal chromatic aberration
that is the one you gotta worry about.
So I wanted to try and create some LoCA on the power zoom
to see if we could do that,
and I have a shot of this fence here,
which normally shows up pretty bad,
but you can see even in the sort of foreground out
of focus areas and then the back a out of focus areas,
there is no fringing or color shifts at all.
And it transitions very smoothly, which is nice.
So I don't see any chromatic aberration issues at all,
and sharpness is great.
It's a great lens.
For an f/4, it's a great lens.
The only thing that isn't particularly great about it
when you close focus and you want that same sharpness,
here's one at f/4, 35 mil,
and I focused on this leaf down here.
And you can see it just has sort of like a soft,
shimmery kind of quality about it,
which is a known aberration that happens
on some lenses when close focusing.
The G Masters don't tend to do this,
but the lesser lenses sometimes do, and you can see it here.
So it's not really something I would wanna do
if I wanted to get these sort of close up details,
you're better off with sort of a more distanced shot.
And we can also use this to sort of talk about
these types of shots that I do sometimes
where you've got water,
there's some melting snow in the background,
and we get down and close and there's rocks.
It creates a lot of very strange bokeh,
like weird little orbs and elements.
So we can look at some of the more peculiar
character of the lens.
These types of things don't come up all the time,
but I like to show them.
So you can get these sort of bizarre,
almost soap bubbly things in the foreground
if you try to create them, which maybe you're into.
And then as we transition a little bit more
into the background,
this is what you get when you shoot sort of up close.
So it has some interesting character.
It's not perfect and sterile,
but if you just wanna see how some fairy lights
look for your more typical outta focus orbs,
this is what you could expect for...
These are the biggest that they're gonna get to,
because F4 and this focal length,
and we do have that sort of outer membrane.
I wouldn't call it completely smooth, they look fine.
They're not the best in the world, but they look fine.
What is good though,
is that you can see the cat eyeing over here
is kind of minimal.
And even if we stick it in the corner,
it doesn't really get any worse up there.
So they keep pretty round shapes, which is nice.
It's just that the contents of the shapes
can have a whole bunch of funky stuff in them,
which can be interesting or not, it's up to you.
They're just not perfect G Master, perfectly smooth orbs.
And then if you care about sunstars,
here's a couple f/22 shots of the sun at 16 mil and 35 mil.
Again, not overly pronounced sunstars,
but they're fine.
Whatever.
Now the one thing that was not great, but then also okay
in a practical situation was flare.
When I did a shot in here dark
where I took the flashlight and ran it around,
I did find that there was quite pronounced flare
and contrast lost throughout the frame,
and quite a few sort of artifacts
from the way that the flare was bouncing across the lens.
But then when I took it outside
and did some more practical stuff of like,
trying to let the sun creep in on the side,
it wasn't as bad.
Normally, I see similar results in and out.
This is a lens that seems like practically,
in a real situation,
you're probably not gonna have issues with flare,
but in a artificial situation,
you can create strong flare.
But put a hood on it
if flares something you're worried about.
Every time I say that, people are like,
"But I like flare."
Okay, well then don't put a hood on it,
but you have the option at least,
and I'm pretty sure there's a hood in the box.
So you get a leather bag, and a hood.
Yeah, it's a shallow one, but you do get a hood.
Use the two accessories that came
with my pre-production copy, anyway.
Now, before we do sort of a final thoughts and pricing,
why don't we throw the lens on that camera since
it can go 35 and I shoot 35 here,
and we can see how it looks?
It will be less shallow than this,
'cause I think I'm shooting at like f/2.2 over there,
and this is gonna be f/4, but let's see how it looks.
(beep)
Okay, the 16 to 35 is on that camera,
and I'm also just realizing I didn't have my tube lights
on this entire video.
I should turn those on for the sake of comparison.
This is what my regular shot looks like.
It's always something,
when you shoot a YouTube video that you forget.
You either forget to turn something on,
or record something or activate something.
This time it was the lights.
Anyway, okay.
This is my regular shot.
Got the lights on, the color rendition looks a little bit
different than the Sony 35 f/1.8 that I was normally using.
And also for those people that asked me the time
about teleprompters, the little parrot one
and what focal length you can use,
this is 35 mil zoomed all the way in.
If we zoom all the way out to 16 mil,
then you can see that we go inside of the teleprompter,
and you can see the entire thing,
which is why we can't use 16.
Also, this shot looks crazy.
It looks like being John Malkovitch somewhere, inside of...
This is weird, but anyway,
if we slowly start to pull back in,
we'll see that around 28 to 29 millimeters,
right around there is where the teleprompter goes away.
So that's about as wide as you could shoot,
maybe like 28, 29.
And then we'll go all the way back into 35,
and that's the regular shot again,
just in case you wanted to know how it would work
with the teleprompter for the parrot podcaster one anyway.
It's also a good time to tell
you about the front filter thread,
because I had to put the adapter on for the teleprompter.
It's 72 millimeters, which compared to the Zeiss,
I think is the same, isn't it?
Yeah, they're both 72 millimeters.
So if you wanted to,
I don't know.
If you were switching lenses for some reason
from one or the other, it's the same,
filter diameter from the Zeiss to the new power zoom,
but we'll talk about that in a second,
whether or not you should.
We talk about value, but first,
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All right, now let's just talk a little bit
about value and about price, comparatively.
So the Zeiss is I think $1350 USD,
it's somewhere around there,
and the new lens is gonna come in at around $1200 USD.
So it's gonna be less expensive, which is good,
because it makes the conversation a lot easier
when it comes to buying a new lens.
Basically, the new one is better
in pretty much every way optically,
lighter, costs less, and has more features.
The only thing it's lacking, like I said,
is the optical, the OSS, the stabilization.
So that's something you really need,
and you think that that extra 5 to 10%
is gonna make a difference, then go with this.
Now, when it comes to...
Like if the conversation was should you run out
and trade up your Zeiss,
or sell this one and get the new one?
I don't know that the improvements are...
I really don't think they're worth an upgrade.
I wouldn't necessarily call it an upgrade from the Zeiss
to the new lens.
I think this is more, if you're shopping for a 16-35,
this is probably the better option to buy now.
But if you already have the Zeiss,
I think you're still getting 85% of the new lens.
It would just come down to if that power zoom,
maybe you're using an FX camera
and you can really utilize that power zoom then, then yeah,
that's a huge difference,
'cause you just can't zoom the same way on the Zeiss.
And you can see the Zeiss actually zooms
with the barrel extending as well.
So, I mean, functionally,
the new lens is just, it's better.
Like I said, it's better in every way,
but optically, the Zeiss isn't that much worse.
So, I don't know.
I'm not trying to sell you on either lens here.
Personally, I don't really use a lot of 16-35 f/4s
for what I shoot.
If I had to buy one today,
and you're just asking me which one would I buy of the two?
I would buy the new one, and not Zeiss,
'cause it's cheaper, and I could use the features more.
But don't feel bad if you just recently bought the Zeiss,
you're still in good shape.
It's still a great lens.
But I mean, if you can return it
and get the other one for cheaper, I'd probably do that.
But otherwise, you're fine.
Anyway, I think that's pretty much it.
I don't have anything else to say.
Buy the lens or don't.
Thanks for watching the video.
I hope you enjoyed it,
I hope was helpful or entertaining or useful
to you in some way.
Thanks to Lindsey over here for operating the zoom.
Catch you on the next one.
Alright...
I'm done.