Today I review Sony E 15mm f/1.4 G, one of their recently announced wide-angle lenses for mirrorless E-mount cameras, tailored for an APS-C crop sensor camera.
This lens is one of the newest additions to Sony’s G series, which is designed for premium performance and quality.
But is this lens a good fit for your needs?
Let’s find out!
Wide-Angle View and Low-Light Excellence of Sony E 15mm
As the full-frame equivalent of 23mm, it boasts a wide-angle view, making it suitable for landscape, cityscape, selfie stick, and electronic gimbal video work.
Its f/1.4 aperture allows somewhat out-of-focus backgrounds and aids in low-light conditions, which is handy when video-making.
Lightweight and Compact Design
On handling, it is impressively lightweight and compact – an advantage of mirrorless camera systems.
Despite its plastic exterior, the lens feels of high quality with a textured finish, a metal rear mount, and weather sealing.
This lens features an auto/manual focus switch, a focus hold button, and an aperture control ring, which can be smoothly set, beneficial for video work, or with clicks for still photography.
The manual focus ring is plastic and smooth, with excellent focus motor response.
Video creators will appreciate the minimal focus breathing.
Versatile Handling and Focus Features
The lens’s autofocus works quickly, efficiently, and silently.
It accepts 55mm front filters and comes with a small plastic hood.
It lacks image stabilization, so consider a Sony camera with built-in image stabilization or a gimbal.
Despite the plastic exterior, it’s well-built, with excellent focusing features, and its size and weight make it easy to carry around.
Image Quality and Post-Processing Adjustments
In terms of image quality, the Sony E 15mm f/1.4 G displayed fantastic resolution and contrast at the center at f/1.4, and decent sharpness with good contrast in the corners, albeit lacking some detail.
Stopping down to f2 or f2.8 brings improvement, but corners never reach razor-sharpness.
This lens exhibits strong vignetting at f/1.4, lessening at f2 and f2.8. Both issues can be adjusted post-production.
Close-up Photography and Light Performance
Close-up image quality at f/1.4 is okay but with low contrast and blue color fringing.
At f/2.8, the close-up image quality becomes excellent.
The lens performs well against bright light with minimal flaring and coma smearing, which is good news for astrophotographers.
Stopping down to f/16 gives nice sun stars.
There’s some color fringing on bokeh highlights at wider apertures, disappearing at f/4.
Conclusion
Overall, I think the strong points of this Sony E 15mm f/1.4 G are its speed, small size, and weight, more optically complex lenses might offer sharper corner image quality.
It does offer a competitive option as a native lens for someone that wants a wide-angle and fast-aperture lens.
Given its impressive performance in low-light conditions and minimal focus breathing, this lens may be particularly well-suited for filmmakers and videographers.
Stills photographers planning to shoot in challenging light conditions or needing the wide-angle view might find the lens beneficial, despite the price point.
But if sharpness across the entire frame is a primary requirement, you may want to consider other options.
If you like to check out some of my Sony lenses blog posts, click below:
Konnichiwa! (Hello!) I'm Pat Tokuyama, a Japanese tofu cookbook author, who travels for music, food, and adventure. If you like Japanese tea, checkout some of the newestorganic japanese tea, matcha bowls and noren and more!
** Curious about the Plant Based Japanese Cooking Club? ** Learn more here!