This is Sony's new 50mm G Master
and with a maximum aperture of f/1.2,
it's their fastest lens to date.
Let's get Undone!
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and it's been S-Log since I've seen you.
So, as usual, some disclosure.
Sony sent me this lens to make this video.
I do not get to keep it, no money changed hands,
and they don't get any input on this video's production
or get to preview it before it's posted.
This video does have a sponsor though, and that's Storyblocks.
And while we're on the topic of being lent stuff from Sony,
I'd like to remind my viewers that despite the recent string
of videos, this is not a Sony-only channel,
but can we all agree that Sony
is releasing products like crazy lately?
It feels like every week there is a new product to cover.
It's quite impressive in some ways, but part of me
wants them to slow down so I can take a break.
But anyway, let's talk about this lens.
Something you should know about me, if you don't already,
is that I'm not a big fan of 50mm as a focal length.
When I bring the camera up to my eye, it never feels like
the composition that I want when a 50mm lens is attached.
So, I think the only fair thing for me to do is just tell you
what is technically good and bad about this lens,
and leave my subjective opinions out of it
as much as possible, because this lens
is personally not for me-- but it is a great lens.
Physically, it's quite similar to the other G Master primes
like the 24mm or the recent 35mm,
with the same declickable aperture ring,
and overall aesthetic, this one is just bigger.
Approximately 40-50% bigger than the 35mm,
coming in at 805g and about 10.8cm, or 4.25" tall.
It's very similar in size to the 50mm f/1.2 for Canon RF,
but the Canon is 150 grams heavier.
It also shares the same minimum focusing distance as the Canon
at 0.4 meters or 1.32 feet,
but the Canon is $300 more expensive,
as I'm told that this Sony lens will be $1,999 USD.
In the box, you get the protective case--
it's nice, well padded-- and then you get the lens hood,
which is the... you know,
style like this with the release button.
Nothing to complain about there. These are the same accessories
that you normally get with a G Master lens.
And this lens is weather sealed
for dust and moisture resistance.
One thing that's physically different about this lens
versus those aforementioned G Masters
is the front filter thread.
The 24mm and 35mm lenses both have a 67mm filter diameter,
but this new 50 takes 72mm filters.
It also has an additional function button
on the top of the lens which could be handy
for portrait shooters when switching
to vertical orientation.
Other than that, it's a G Master lens,
so you can expect pretty similar performance to the other lenses
in that line, including similar annoyances.
For example, just like I complained about on the 35mm,
the focus breathing is quite aggressive on this lens.
Not nearly as bad as the 35mm, but still quite evident.
It also doesn't have a stellar reproduction ratio.
As I mentioned, it competes fairly
with the other 50mm f/1.2 lenses,
but I don't really find it that impressive
when it comes to getting very tight detail shots.
But maybe that's just a subjective complaint
of mine about this particular focal length.
And like other G Masters it excels at autofocusing.
The focus transitions are smooth and snappy
and extremely reliable.
And when gathering my sample images,
which I'll show you in a moment,
I didn't have a single issue with missed focus
or hesitation the entire time I've been borrowing this lens.
It uses Sony's XD linear motors, which are not only fast,
but essentially silent.
So, this lens is extremely quiet while focusing.
Manual focusing is decent.
Like the 24 and 35, it offers about a 130-degree
focus throw and the response is linear and repeatable.
The focus ring is sufficiently dampened,
and other than the breathing, the experience is pretty great.
Not cine lens level of course,
but solid for a photography lens.
The aperture ranges from f/1.2 down to f/16.
It's impressively sharp throughout the range,
even at f/1.2, and sun stars are visible and pronounced at f/16.
There is some cat-eyeing with the bokeh at f/1.2
as you approach the edges, but the purity
and consistency of the out of focus orbs is great.
You can remove the cat-eyeing as you stop down
with most of it gone by f/2, but you do start to see
aperture blades and they get more pronounced by f/2.8.
This lens, by the way, is using an 11-bladed circular iris.
Flare is also well-controlled,
as expected from a G Master lens.
Even in direct sunlight, the ghosting and glare is subdued,
and the minimal reduction in contrast is terrific.
In normal scenes the contrast is excellent.
Colours are rich and saturated, and the rendering
is very pleasing and free from any casts or impurities.
But let's explore that a little further
with the sample images I loaded onto my laptop.
And while I boot this up,
let me tell you about today's sponsor, Storyblocks:
Have you ever found yourself in a situation
where you could really use some footage,
but shooting it yourself was either budgetarily
or logistically unfeasible?
Well, Storyblocks has you covered with an impressive
collection of stock footage covering a wide range
of subjects with unlimited downloads and 4K video.
There also amply supplied with backgrounds, overlays,
and after effects templates and the interface is easy to use
and navigate and the clips are royalty-free
for both personal and commercial use,
so you can use them as much as you want, wherever you want.
So, if you think you could take advantage of a fantastic library
of quality stock footage and effects, check out Storyblocks
using the link in the description below.
So, just like when I reviewed the 35mm lens,
I took some images that, you know,
aren't particularly beautiful, but I think
are great at showing strengths and flaws of this lens.
So, let's start off with some sharpness tests.
In these two images here
the one on the left is at f/1.2,
and the one on the right is f/2.8 just to see,
you know, if it's soft when wide open
and as you can see the 2.8 is a little bit better,
but it's excellent at 1.2, like, just...
absolutely fantastic. As we move out toward the edges
we can see that the stopped down 2.8
is doing better than 1.2 here now,
so centre sharpness at 1.2 is excellent.
And it gets worse out towards the edge. But if you're doing
like a portrait where you really only care about the subject
in the middle, I don't think this is going to be an issue
and you can get very shallow depth of field
if that's what you want and still maintain
excellent sharpness. And then just to give you an idea
of how sharp we're talking about here on the right now
We have the Sigma 24-70 f/2.8
which is a great lens. G Master is on the left
and the Sigma 24-70 is on the right
and they are quite similar. But you have to keep in mind
This is f/1.2 versus f/2.8
and I would say we're actually getting
slightly better sharpness on the f/1.2.
Let's take a look over in the corner.
And yeah, I would say they're pretty similar. So, that should
give you a sort of an indication of sharpness. This lens performs
approximately at f/1.2 like the Sigma 24-70 performs at 2.8.
So, that's... that's impressive.
Now, let's take a look at-- for chromatic aberration here.
So, we'll punch in here. Now, you can see just a little bit
of longitudinal chromatic aberration.
We're going, you know, green to purple here
and there's a little bit of lateral as well.
And this is at 1.2
and if we stopped down, here, this is 1.6
you can see that it's subsides a lot.
The green and the purple and then at f/2
it's, you know, mostly gone, and we're really punched in.
If we were here you wouldn't be able to see it at all.
But even at f/1.2 it's not too bad, but this
really gives you an idea of how shallow this lens is
as we, sort of, stop down like this.
But yeah, I was quite pleased with
the chromatic aberration. Here it is at f/2 again.
And then here it is at f/1.2. So, really great results.
This one here, again, is the reproduction ratio.
I feel like that's not very tight at all.
And again, this is the subjective part,
but I did find that when I was bringing it up to my eye
and I would be at a distance that I thought I wanted to be
from the subject and I would bring it up
and then I'd have to pull back in order to focus
and I found that kept happening over, and over, and over again.
That's probably because you can get closer with a 35mm.
So, maybe that's just what I'm used to.
But I was running into that problem. I was like,
"Ah, darn!" and I had to back up and then the composition
was a little bit off, but this is what it looks like.
This is as close as you can possibly focus.
Fence shot, just to see again if there's fringing
throughout the frame and how it handles, and the focus
roll off and stuff like that, but also detail-wise,
as you can see it's incredibly sharp,
but also look how shallow that is, like, you only get...
I don't know maybe a centimetre in focus
before it starts to fall off
but it's excellent and there's no issues really
with the fringing at depth so longitudinal is, again,
really well controlled, and you can see the contrast
is really quite great here as well.
Then we did some brick wall stuff. This one is wide open
so you can see a little bit of the vignetting
and you can also observe a little bit of distortion.
There's not a lot on this lens
and all of these images, by the way,
are without lens corrections on.
I don't think the lens corrections are in Lightroom
yet anyway, but I turned them all off
just to make sure I wasn't using them.
So, this is this is worst-case scenario for this lens,
but I'm sure when the profiles are there, little bit
of distortion and vignetting is going to be corrected
with your raw developer anyway.
So, f/1.2 and then f/2.
So, you can see a little bit of that shading
in the corners is gone, the peripheral illumination
gets fixed, and the distortion, you know, maybe is a little bit
better, but it's still there a little bit. It's not bad.
You can just see a little bit of bowing here
along the lines of the brick wall, but you can fix this
in Lightroom just by adding a little bit of distortion.
But again, it'll be corrected with lens profiles.
Now, let's take a look at f/1.2 centre frame versus edges.
if we punch in right here, you can see
it's incredibly sharp in the centre of the frame.
But this is, this is absurd and these
were all shot at, like, 50MP so we can really,
you know, punch in and take a look.
But if we go over to the edge,
you know, we can see that it's definitely softer
and by stopping down I think if we do a little comparison here.
Let's punch in here.
So, this is centre at 1.2 versus 2.8.
But if we go to the edge, we can definitely see
that the 2.8 version-- is this what this is, 2.8? Let me check.
2.0, actually. This is f/2. So, we can see that even at f/2
you do get significant improvement
over in the corners and then based on that
and the comments that I made about the bokeh
I would suggest that f/2 might be the sweet spot
for this lens if you wanted one, but as you can see here
it does do better at f/2 over in the edges.
Okay, next step. I took this image for two purposes.
One, to give you an idea of the contrast
and saturation of colours
as well that you could just kind of see the detail
that it's capable of resolving.
So, if we punch way in here to the graffiti,
we can see we have a tremendous amount of detail
and those colours really pop.
They're very rich and vibrant
which I like and in the overall scene here
the colours do well for, you know,
an otherwise pretty grey day.
But yeah, I'm really happy with the rendering.
What do we got here? This one was just to show you
how the focus falls off, which is extreme, like this
is too much for me. 50mm at f/1.2,
you get these excellent details and I love how sharp
the lens is and how and how great it looks
but the focus just falls off way too soon.
Like, it's really just this one strip,
but you can see that it-- I would say
that it happens quite smoothly and it's nice.
It just looks a little bit unnatural to me
because of how narrow it is. Like, I wouldn't shoot
this scene like this, but I did want to give you an idea.
Out of focus object in the foreground
the water in the background.
This branch is starting to come
out of focus and you can see how it transitions.
It's nice. It's just extreme.
It's so, so shallow. This shot here is to show you
the... the aberration I was talking about.
So, again, detail is great. But if we punch in on the trees...
let me get a little bit closer here.
You can see that there's some aberration
all over the little branches there.
Now, this one can be easily fixed.
This lateral is not really that big of an issue.
If we jump over into the Develop tab
go over here to Lens Correction and just increase the amount
of defringe in that purple area as we bring it up.
Just a little bit and it's gone.
So, it's fixable but you should
be aware that with no corrections on
it is there and it does exist in this
kind of, you know, tree branches against the sky,
which is common and you see that all the time.
This shot I did for a few reasons.
One, it's as tight again as you can get.
So, this is, again, this is the maximum,
you know, reproduction of this plant.
And also it's going to show you how the focus falls off
and what the out-of-focus areas look like.
And also just how rich the colours are.
little bit overexposed in some places.
But again, those greens are just so rich. I'm really pleased
with how punchy and contrasty this image is.
I just wish I could get a little bit tighter.
Next up is, again, just for out of focus.
I've got two things to show you here
One, to show you just how thin the depth of field is.
So, I focused on this little piece of green here,
but you can see, sort of, like how smooth and buttery
the background is and also this will give you an idea of how
razor-thin the actual focus is, and we can see a little bit
of out of focus, you know, orbs swirling around here.
If you want an idea of, like, the little
micro bokeh quality that you can see here.
So, that's what that looks like.
I actually kind of like this image. I don't know what it is.
It's something-- maybe it's just the colour,
but I like the way how it's a little bit
abstract and looks great-- and so, yeah, I'm pleased
with this lens' rendering and resolving power.
Overall, this is a top quality lens that comes in
lighter and a little cheaper than the competition.
And if you could put a 50mm f/1.2 to good use,
I think you'll be quite happy with this lens.
Which brings me to a question I have for you:
How many of you out there are 50mm shooters?
I'd love to get a sense of that from my audience,
so let me know in the comments below.
But that's gonna be it for me. I hope you found
this video entertaining or least helpful.
And if you did, make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
try setting the playback speed to 75%.
Alright... I'm done.