Sony DT 18-70 mm f/3.5-5.6 review - Ghosting, flares and transmission

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Sony DT 18-70 mm f/3.5-5.6

22 October 2010

Arkadiusz Olech

9. Ghosting, flares and transmission

The Sony 18-70 mm deals with inner reflections quite well. Characteristic flares and light artifacts can be caught but only at a quite specific combination of aperture, focal length and the position of a bright object in the frame corner. We managed to get them at some focal lengths from the middle of the range but we didn’t succeed for example at the ends of the range.

Sony DT 18-70 mm f/3.5-5.6 - Ghosting, flares and transmission

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The lens fares well in this category partially because of anti-reflection coatings, quite good for this class of equipment. The transmission graph, presented below, provides more info about their performance.

We like the flat graph, reaching near 90% in the 470-700 nm range. It means the lens doesn’t lose much light and the colour rendition is quite natural. You can express some reservations only about the part near the purple light, where the transmission decreases to about 70%. It should be kept in mind, though, that in order to get the transmission level of nearly 90% in a device with 9 groups of elements, so having as many as 18 air-to-glass surfaces to cover, the light loss on one surface must be minimized to circa 0.6%. For this price segment such a level seems to be very decent indeed.