Sony Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 35 mm f/2.8 ZA review - Summary

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Sony Carl Zeiss Sonnar T* FE 35 mm f/2.8 ZA

20 August 2016

Arkadiusz Olech

11. Summary

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Pros:

compact and solid casing of high quality,
good image quality in the frame centre already from the maximum relative aperture,
slight longitudinal chromatic aberration,
very low lateral chromatic aberration,
lack of serious spherical aberration issues,
accurate, fast and noiseless autofocus.

Cons:

unsatisfactory image quality on the edge of full frame,
huge vignetting visible even on the smaller APS-C sensor,
a bit too high level of coma.

Small, handy, solid, with good build quality and outstanding sharpness in the frame centre – for many people these features would be a recommendation good enough to purchase the lens. Providing that its price is right. In the case of the Zeiss Sonnar 2.8/35 that price exactly, almost $800, might prove problematic. It seems steep not only compared to e.g. the price of the Canon EF 40 mm f/2.8/35, a device three times cheaper, but also to that of the faster and stabilized Canon EF 35 mm f/2.0 IS USM or the Sigma A 35 mm f/1.4 DG HSM, by 2 EV faster, or the Nikkor AF-S 35 mm f/1.8G ED, also noticeably faster than the tested lens. Every one of these three provides you with more photographic opportunities and is more optically complex. Even the place of production cannot justify the price of the Zeiss – after all both the Canon 2/35 IS and the Sigma A 1.4/35 are manufactured in Japan as well. As a result we don’t hesitate to say that the tested lens’s price/possibilities ratio is rather unfavourable; of course it doesn’t mean that its owners will be dissatisfied with the photographic results.