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Image Quality
70-200mm lenses are often one of the bread-and-butter lenses of a camera system, and they tend to be workhorse lenses that get a lot of use. With these things in mind and the moderate 2.85x zoom ratio, manufacturers also tend to focus on excellent optics with their 70-200mm lenses, and Sony, thankfully, has done so as well.
Sharpness
The FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS produces images with very good image sharpness throughout the focal range and at all apertures, though how good it is across the frame varies with focal length and focus distance. At 70mm, the center is impressively sharp at all focus distances, and this sharpness extends across the majority of the frame. The edges and corners show a little minor softening at wide apertures, though these sharpen up to quite good levels upon stopping down.
In the middle of the zoom range, the 70-200mm is excellent closer up, with very sharp results across the frame from f/4, with only a touch of minor softness in the corners that disappears when stopping down, though it oddly inverts its edge performance at infinity, with a bit of softness at the edge of the frame.
At the long end, the lens can be a bit of a mixed bag, though it’s still quite good throughout. The center is sharp at all apertures and focus distances, though the corners lag behind when focused closer up. They’re very soft wide open and don’t ever get truly sharp stopped down. However, at infinity, the lens is quite sharp across the frame at 200mm. The edge sharpness at the long end when focused close doesn’t bother me, as most of the time these compositions don’t require great corners. See the image above (and the included 100% crop) to see how good this lens can be wide open. Overall, I think the lens engineers did an excellent job balancing sharpness where and when it’s needed.
Bokeh
The 70-200mm f/4 does a nice job with regards to out of focus character, producing generally pleasing background blur with smooth falloff.. Specular highlights show no obvious outlining, but they do show fairly prominent onion ring centers due to the aspherical elements in use. On the whole, however, I don’t feel this distracts from the rendering of the lens in most instances, and I was pleased with the bokeh produced by the lens.
Color, Contrast and Chromatic Aberration
The Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 produces images with a pleasing contrast profile and relatively neutral color response. This lays a nice base for postprocessing, as it’s punchy enough to be pleasing, but not over the top. The images take saturation and contrast adjustment with ease. The performance here is perfectly fine, though it’s a bit of a flatter rendering than what I’ve experienced with other 70-200mm zoom lenses for other systems. For example, I noticed when I compared the lens to my Canon 70-200mm f/4L, the Canon produced richer color to my eye.
Lateral and longitudinal chromatic aberration are both very well controlled with this lens. It is very rare to see in real world images even at 100% magnification.
Distortion, Flare and Vignetting
With regards to distortion, the FE 70-200mm f/4 produces similar results to many telephoto zoom lenses. There is mild barrel distortion at the wide end of the zoom range, that progresses to slight pincushion distortion at the middle of the range, which worsens towards 200mm. While the distortion at 200mm is noticeable when shooting buildings and such, it’s not severe. When shooting subjects with straight lines, using the built in-profile for correction in Lightroom or Capture One eliminates the distortion with minimal residual effects on image sharpness.
Unfortunately, I found flare resistance to be fairly poor with this lens. In some situations, contrast is only minorly affected, but shooting around the sun in these situations shows purple and green flare emanating from the sun away from the center of the image frame, along with some smaller ghosts. However, in other situations, especially at the wider end of the zoom range, contrast can be significantly affected, and large flare ghosts appear throughout the frame. The shot above is a 3 shot HDR, but the contrast was so severely limited that detail was lost in all three exposures. Also, large purple and smaller green ghosting is clearly visible. Thankfully, with the narrow angle of view this lens produces and the deep lens hood, these situations aren’t too common when shooting the lens.
The lens shows notable corner shading at f/4 at all focal lengths, which eases significantly at wider focal lengths when stopping down. At the long end, however, some vignetting is visible even at f/8.
When looking at the lens as a whole, the FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS is a strong performer, but it’s certainly not a flawless performer. While I was very pleased with the images I got from the lens, the high price tag left me wanting just a bit more.
I have the FE 70-200 and the FE 24-240, as well as a Canon 70-200 f/2.8. I use all of them on Sony A7S, A7R, A7 II and A7R II bodies.
I find the FE 70-200’s image quality far inferior to the Canon 70-200’s and probably about the same, if not worse, than the FE 24-240. It is very soft on the edges and in the corners, and if you attempt to use it for astrophotography you’ll find you get both star stretch and coma on the edges and in the corners.
For the price, the Sony FE 70-200 f/4 is NOT a good deal!!
Buy a Canon lens and Metabones adapter. You’ll spend about the same and get good image quality across the full sensor of a full frame camera. Or spend a lot less and get about the same image quality with the FE 24-240 and get a 24 -> 240mm field-of-view.
While I agree that the Canon 70-200s are a good option for many people. I have gone that route as well for my own kit (with the 70-200/4L), but it sounds to me like you have a copy of the lens with some optical defects, as your description of the performance doesn’t match my experience with the Sony at all. I do think the lens is a bit overpriced (as I mentioned in my conclusion), but it’s still a very good lens.
My copy of the 70-200 blows away my copy of the 24-240 in IQ. I did get one bad copy first which was horrendous but the second one is phenomenal. Really is worth the cash!
My copy is exceptional sharp and is sharper than my Minolta 80-200 APO HS and not far off the focus speed.
Can you use it with a speed booster? How would the Cannon IS version perform on the new A6300? What is the best use of $1000 in this case? Cannon or a used Sony? I always enjoy your pictures by the way, you seem to have a better eye than most bloggers for sure 🙂
You should be able to use it with a Speed Booster. My guess is it would work quite well, but I haven’t tested the a6300 yet.
Best review I’ve seen of this lens. Good job!