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Sony 24-240 E mount lens review Pt III

/in , /by

Today the third part in the lens review from the Sony 24-240 E mount.
Part I can be found here
Part II can be found here

 

Today let’s look at the one point where the 24-240 failed on the A7r…. movement and tracking movement.

 

Birds in flight
Ok I agree maybe it’s not completely fair to do a test like this on the A7r, the A7r is not the fastest/best focussing camera in the Sony line up, and it’s also not why I use the camera. Most of the time I shoot with A mount lenses and I use the convertor with SLT mirror which speeds up the AF considerably so when shooting an Emount lens I loose this extra AF engine, but on the other hand, it is what it is, and this is the camera I use, and the test I did is something I love to do when I have the chance, so for me it’s a very important test, so that’s why I decided to include it in this review series.

 

On the boat from Den Helder to Texel you have 20 minutes to freeze your butt off and take some bird shots, the seagulls are always an easy target because they are always around the boats I’m on, now don’t get me wrong they are not EASY to shoot, when they are in flight next to the boat it’s easy but that’s not the most interesting part, it gets interesting when someone feeds them or throws some bread to them because then they will fly in and the wings/movement are much more interesting, but… it also gets a lot harder to shoot them when something in your chain is not working the way it should. They are pretty fast and even with the A99 and the 70-400 it’s not a 100% easy job.

 

I’ve shot several birds in flight with the 70-400 MKII lens and on the A99 this is a very nice experience, the lens is razor sharp, very fast and the tracking of the A99 is awesome (as long as you keep it centered, this is something Sony really HAS to change in a successor, the focus area should be much wider than only the middle of the frame), the A7r as mentioned before is slower than the A99 with the SLT convertor but gets a LOT slower when using just the Emount lens… but how much slower.

 

Well in all honestly, it’s not 100% useless but it’s a “frustrating” affair trying to shoot the birds in flight, in 80% of the cases the focus is too slow, the bird is out of the frame when you finally get the shot, and the tracking is well….. let me put it this way I longed for the A99.

 

Still I managed to get some pretty decent shots but I missed some awesome shots to be honest.
When it hits the focus it’s a matter of hit/miss again, some images are nice in the sharpness department some are just barely usable. When I compare the amount of shots I took to the amount of keepers and compare it to the A99 with 70-400 MKII one could say the 24-240 is rather useless for this kind of work, but still I managed to get some cool shots which for most people would be good enough to end up in the photobook so I’ll let you decide how important you find this part of the review. For me it’s clear as day, as much as I love the lens when walking around and how much I liked the often snappy focus in normal situations the more frustrating using this lens with the birds was….. but again there is of course no lens that will shine in all areas and I think the 24-240 is already pretty cool in the all the other areas I used it on, but when I want to shoot birds in flight….. well I’ll switch to the 70-200f2.8 or the 70-400MKII and use the SLT convertor or A99. But in all honestly I would have been very surprised if the 24-240 would get me more keepers during this session, you have to know the limitations of your gear so to say 😀

 

Tomorrow the final part in this review, the conclusion……..

Click on the images to open the gallery

 

Sony 24-240 E mount lens review Pt II

/in , /by

Today part II in the review of the Sony 24-240.
Part I can be found here.

 

In the previous review I took you guys to the beachcombers museum and we looked at how the lens performed in a museum like visit, today we’re gonna see how well it performed outside while walking around, something I think most people will do while on a trip or vacation.

 

One of the things I find very important in a lens is the overal image quality, now with most cheap lenses or other super zooms you will always have a tradeoff, this is very easy to explain of course, you pay a lot less money or you get a lot more zoom so that will cost you quality. The question is “how much of this quality are you willing to sacrifice?”

 

Image quality
In all honesty I didn’t expect the world of this lens, I wanted to test it for the simple reason that you always hope for something spectacular but I expected it to go back to Sony with the idea of “It was a nice lens to look at but… not my thing” however during the test I grew actually very fond of the lens. One of the things I’m very picky about is sharpness, I didn’t expect the same sharpness as the 24-75 Zeiss but the 24-240 actually surprised me (a lot), even wide open the images only need a little bit of sharpening to give you sharp images on the wide end and fair sharp images on the long end. The image stabilization helps with the longer shutter speeds and on the long end, also focussing the lens becomes a lot easier because it’s an optical stabilizer and not the in body stabilizer that some Sony cameras use, meaning you can actually SEE the stabilizer work, making it easier to “focus” on your subject. I’m “always” using center focus point and keeping that on your subject if it moves is just that much easier with an optically stabilized lens.

 

The contrast of the images is very good and so are the colors.
There is some distortion and chromatic aberration but in “the modern workflow” with todays RAW convertors everything is actually easily/automaticly fixed, actually when using DxO optics 10 you can see the images “popping” in to the correct look. The one thing I did notice on a lot of shots is some shading from the lens hood so I would actually advise you to remove this when shooting wide (also mentioned in yesterdays blogpost).

 
The perfect walk around lens?
Walking around with a lens with 10x optical zoom makes you much more flexible, I know there are a lot of people out there that will claim that primes are much sharper/faster etc. and indeed they are 100% right, I also have and use primes. However when walking the streets of for example New York (or Emmeloord) a prime is a lens I find very limiting for myself, and I know this is a personal matter, I know a lot of people that love the fixed lens cameras and they can’t all be wrong of course, for me however I love to switch between closeups and wide shots. As mentioned in yesterdays review I used the Minolta 35-200 a lot on my A99 but I always found that lens a bit limiting in the wide segment I sometimes just wanted a little bit more wide options, with the Sony 24-240 it really hits the sweet spot, the 24 is what I would normally label as “I don’t need to go wider in most cases” and the 240 is just awesome to have for bringing in details or shooting someones portrait without coming to close. When I want wider I can always switch for the Sigma 12-24 (which I love) and when I need longer I’m often in situations where I will probably only use a longer lens (for example when shooting birds or wild life).

 

During our trip in Texel I found that I never really wanted to go wider, I also only once switched to the 70-400 and that was in a wild life reserve where I wanted to get it all just a little bit closer, for most tourists, day trip people etc. I can hardly imagine however that you would ever want to switch lenses during normal daytime shooting. For me the 24-240 grew on me and at the moment I’m really fond of the lens and would love to take it out on the streets in a city like New York, there are so many options to shoot there and this range would just give me endless oppertunities.
And indeed a prime is much faster and much sharper… but in the end it’s all about one thing that matters…. getting the shot and with a 10x zoom you have many options to shoot the same scene, and that’s something I really love.

 

Tomorrow part III with some bird shots… and the not so nice review about the 24-240. Hey after 2 positives I can be negative for once right 😀

 

 

 

Sony 24-240 lens review Pt I. : Texel Jutters museum Flora

/in , /by

This weekend we visited Texel in the Netherlands to test the new Sony 24-240 lens (E mount) on my A7r.
During this week I’ll show you some images and give you information about my experience with this special lens, in the end I’ll give a full conclusion review with some 100% crops. Annewiek also filmed a video review on the lens with the new Sony 4K cam corder, she is working on the video and we hope to have this also online this week.

 

Today let’s start with Part I.

 

The 24-240
Let me start by saying that my dream lens would be a 10-400 F2.8 in a small and handy package, but in all reality that will “never” happen, so you will have to settle for something less. Over the years I’ve tested some so called “Superzooms” and to be honest I was never really impressed, of course it’s cool to have a long range so you don’t have to switch lenses but in most of the cases the image quality was so subpar that I lost all interest in the lens the moment I openend up the images in Photoshop. Also a lot of the superzooms are incredibly slow with focussing taking away that special moment I need with street photography.

 

When Sony announced the 24-240 my first response was of course… “let’s try it, but it will probably disappoint”, and this is the way I started this review. I can already tell you that this will not be a HALLELUJA review, I’m always honest in my reviews and this one will be no exception.

 

The lens itself
The build quality of the lens is nice, everything is nice and smooth and the 24-240 has the cool Sony feature that if you turn the focus dial the EVF gives you a magnified view to really pinpoint your focus where and how you want it, this is one of the things I LOVE about the EVF, if you (like me) love to work with manual focus lenses this is without a doubt one of the major selling points.

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The “speed” of the lens is 3.5 to 6.3 which according to some will be too slow… but wait.
Yes indeed it’s not a 2.8 lens but we are talking about a 10x zoom lens, the nice thing however with this lens is that the lens also has an Optical Stabilization system on board which makes it possible to shoot on lower shutter speeds and this helps with the “slowness” of the lens.

 

Again as mentioned before I would love the lens to be a constant F2.8 or F4 but in all reality the lens would be much more expensive and MUCH more heavy and that would take away the reason I love this lens, when traveling having one lens on your camera which is “small” and lightweight is a very big bonus.

 

Most of all I care about sharpness and focus speed, because this is actually were most superzooms I tested failed miserably, actually the only superzoom I ever liked was the Minolta 35-200 which is pretty sharp and also reasonably fast, the problem with this lens is however that it does work on my A99 but not via the convertor on my A7r due to the motorzoom so I can’t use that lens on my favorite walk around camera the A7r. For the 24-240 I can say I was more than pleasantly surprised, the 24-240 is surprisingly sharp, I will not say it rivals the 24-75 Zeiss but this is not what you expect from a superzoom, even wide open the images only need a little bit of sharpening to come out “sharp”, on the wide end I would rate the lens as “good” and on the long end as “fair”, or in other words (when stopped down it gets a lot better), without any hesitation I would use this lens as my walk around lens. The contrast is great, the color is good (but I always adjust this later) and the distortions are easily corrected by Lightroom or DxO (the ones I tested).

 

Autofocus is another story
Now I tested this lens on the A7r and the A7r is not the best AF camera Sony has on the market, I don’t use a lot of E-mount lenses and for the A mount lenses I use the convertor with the SLT mirror which speeds up the AF a lot. During the trip I found a few situations where the 24-240 on the longer end really was slow with focussing but overal as a walk around lens I didn’t miss any shots, I did try to shoot some birds with it and…. well I’ll show you that in a next blogpost but let me put it this way, it’s not a birding lens although I managed to get some really cool keepers.

 

The Jutters museum Flora
During this trip we were guided by one of Texels best photographers Stefan Kroft, and one of the sites we visited was the Jutters Museum Flora.

 

The translation for Jutter is actually Beachcomber and this translates indeed pretty well. What these people do is walk around the beaches and find stuff that “the sea gives to them”, or in essence they take the stuff that floats ashore from ships that lost it or ships that sank or got in trouble. Of course there are very cool stories like the time when there were hundreds of shoes ashore but they were only left shoes… it makes you wonder what happened to the right ones right ?

 

Today I want to show you some images I took inside the museum.
All images were shot with the Sony 24-240 lens on the Sony A7r.

 

The test for me was to see in how far I would be limited by the lens inside and outside with some lens flare tests and of course if I would feel the need to switch lenses. During the whole trip I carried also my 75-400 (which I used once) and the Zeiss 24-75 f2.8 which I used… zero times (much to my surprise). Due to the smaller aperture I was forced to shoot on slightly higher ISOs in some cases but in all honestly the A7r is pretty good with high ISOs and when combined with the new MacPhun Noiseless or DxO optics Pro noise is not really an ISO anymore for me, of course you can still see some noise when pixel peeping on the screen but when printing up to A2 I hardly see any noise up to ISO6400 and I even have some 12800 shots that printed incredibly good after going through DxO’s prime noise reduction.

 

All shots were edited with DxO optics 10 and tinted with DxO filmpack.
Click on one of the images to go to the gallery.

Tomorrow Pt II in the review series.

Sony HDR AS100 action cam

/in , /by

Today a review from the Sony HDR-AS100 action cam.
As you know from me I will give you my opinion, no resolution charts, no pixel peeping, just the way I use it and my opinion.

 

As most of you know I love to be active during my free time and one of the things I love to do is mountain biking (or just biking), we live in a nice area for biking and often I’m asked online if I can show some of the routes I bike, one could of course do this by taken some photos (which I normally also do) but it’s more fun if you can see the video right? So it was time to get a so called Action Cam, now one thing I noticed from myself is that although I claim to be not brand loyal I went to the store and asked not for an action cam but for a GoPro Hero4……

 

In the past I bought a GoPro because everyone told me it was the best action camera out there, and to be honest it was a very nice camera although I had to add a lot of extras like the display and still I could not really see what I was doing in bright sunlight (by the way this is all a non issue with the new generation), also when we watch a movie and you see action cam sequences the first thing we say is “GoPro” now this is actually quite good for GoPro, it means they did their work and marketing VERY well, it’s a bit like GoPro for a lot of people is the same as action cam so if you buy one… it’s not an action cam but a GoPro… so also with me.

 

The store I bought my camera was Tuerlings in Tilburg, they helped us out with the Scott Kelby Photowalk this year and they sold the GoPro’s so I thought it would be nice to buy it from them. Now one thing I have to say about Tuerlings, this is the kind of shop you want to buy gear, their staff is very knowledgable and friendly and they really give you a VERY good and solid advice, as I was about to find out.

 

As soon as I told the salesperson about what I wanted to do with my GoPro/Action cam he immediately said that I would be much better off with the Sony HDR AS100. At first I was a bit stunned… Sony? as an action cam? I’ve been shooting Sony photo cameras for a while now but I never (to be honest) even looked at their action cams. Thanks to Tuerlings I got the guarantee that if I did not liked the camera I could bring it back, no questions asked, and exchange it for a GoPro. Well in that case…..

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The camera itself
I hate to bore you with all the specs but here we go :
Very good Zeiss lens
Up to 50mb/s video (XAV S or MP4)
120 AND 240 fps action freezing motion video (slow motion that is)
Natural and vivid colorsettings
GPS
Wrist remote control and display
Splash water proof
Easy menu
Stereo sound
Wifi and NFC
Underwater color balance
170 degrees lens without steady shot and 120 degrees with steady shot
Steadyshot
1920×1080 at a max of 60 fps
720P at a max of 120 fps
800×480 at a max of 240 fps
Microphone input
HDMI output
Several Photo (13.5MP) options like interval, burst, time-lapse, motionshot LE,

 

The camera itself is very small and compared to the GoPro’s I actually like the form factor from Sony a lot more, the menus are really easy to navigate, although I would have liked to have format a bit more easily accessible. The main thing I love about the Sony is the splash water proof, this means you can just use the camera without it’s housing on your bike (car or whatever) without the fear of it getting wet, and because there is no casing the sound and image quality is optimal, one thing I don’t like is the way the microSD card is mounted, this can be either way and one would expect that it would only fit one way. Also I had some trouble finding the right MicroSD card, but when I got the correct one in the mail from Tuerlings it actually worked right away, so beware of this make sure you buy a card with the camera.

 

Battery life is ok but nothing more, on the other hand I think it’s a limitation of all cameras that run with tiny accupacks, I get app 2 hours out of a battery with GPS and wifi enabled, with wifi off it should last a lot longer, GPS I don’t want to turn off because I actually love this feature. It’s great to see where you biked and in the Sony software you can even overlay the GPS information in the video, the quality of the video does take a hit (hardly noticeable on most material)  but it looks pretty cool so let’s hope they will fix that later on.

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The image stabilization is a BIG BIG advantage.
Of course you can do this later in Premiere or Final Cut Pro but to have it in camera is in my opinion always best, especially when filming a few hours of material. Now you can always argue if image stabilization is the reason to buy the Sony so let’s see if there is more…. because there is.

 

We already talked about GPS but what’s the most important thing about a camera?
Of course…. the image quality.
And I can be very very short about this one, the Sony is absolutely awesome, the GoPro might have 4K in the most expensive version but the dynamic range and color rendition of the Sony really surprised me, now I have to be honest that I did not have the opportunity to compare the two next to each other but also when you read reviews online the Sony wins hands down on pure image quality and I can only say that for an action cam I was pleasantly surprised about the quality.

 

The vivid color mode is… well ok vivid, I like it and I use it for my bike rides, however if I want serious image quality I will switch to the natural looking color setting which is indeed much more natural of course and is easily tuned in your editing software. Most of all however I am impressed by the dynamic range of the camera and it’s ability to operate at very little light, again I don’t have a GoPro4 here to compare but the Sony does incredibly well in low light situations. I made a small video tour of our studio handholding the camera and using image stabilization and the on board microphone which you can see here, and trust me… the studio was pretty dark.

As you can see the Sony did really well and this was actually one of the reasons we wanted to get a new action cam, my old GoPro was very bad in low light situations.

 

As expected it’s best to choose the setting 50 (or 60fps) for recording anything with movement, I tried a few videos on 25/30 just for testing and the image jumps around way too much, on 50/60 it’s very very smooth and the added image stabilization almost gives you the idea that you are seeing a glide cam, the next clip is actually me riding my bike with the camera mounted on the handle bars (not the perfect place for shocks, realize that parts of this route are off road and VERY bumpy. The video is sped up but you get a pretty good idea I think about some of the tricky lighting situations and the overal image quality. I did had to compress the heck out of the video so don’t mind the lack of detail, we had a very slow connection where I uploaded this (even slower than in the studio) and the video was never intended to be used for a review, but I do like to show it because you can see the way the Sony handles the lighting and stabilization.

 

Cases and holder
When I posted online I got the Sony the first few responses were mostly from people telling me I made a huge mistake and I would never ever be able to get all the accessories that GoPro has etc. Well I can be very short in this regard…. even if I couldn’t…. who cares…. as long as you can find the accessories and mounts YOU need, in my case the car and my bike, it’s ok right?

 

What people often don’t realize is that GoPro indeed has a huge amount of mounts and accessories, but don’t worry…. Sony sells a convertor which makes it possible to mount your Sony action cam on the GoPro accessories.

 

The wrist remote
This I really really love.
With the Sony package I got a wrist remote was included, at first you might think “well let’s skip that one” especially because the Sony is (like most other modern Sony cams) compatible with my iPhone app for Sony and shows you the image on your smartphone (also Android) however you have to start the app, make connection etc. The wrist remote works like a charm, connection is made in seconds and you can see what the camera does and start/stop recording all from your wrist. Because most action cams don’t have an LCD display (which also doesn’t really make sense) it’s always hard to adjust them exactly the way you want it. I used the LCD backpack on my GoPro but never really liked it, it did make it easier but especially in bright sunlight it was hardly visible and it was still a matter of guess work. The new GoPro’s have way better integration with remotes and smart devices but I absolutely love the wrist control.

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Conclusion
The Sony action cam is awesome, the image quality is in my personal opinion incredibly good. I love the added GPS and the wrist remote/LCD screen, the image stabilization rocks (well actually it prevents that) and overal the package is incredibly well thought out and very very nice. The included software is ok, for people not familiar with editing software like final cut or premiere it will be more than adequate and adding GPS information is loads of fun.

 

Overall I’m incredibly happy I went for the Sony instead of the GoPro, the 4K from the GoPro did got my interest (we own a 4K projector) but in the end I thought the other features from the Sony were more important for what I’m using the material for and I’m glad I did.

 

Many thanks to Foto Tuerlings in Tilburg for giving me the right advise, if you live in that are make sure to check them out.

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http://www.sony.net/Products/actioncam/en-us/?j-short=ActionCam