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Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review

Sony's 'G' lenses form much of their professional range and have price tags to match. Here we'll investigate whether this popular lens is worthy of the pro price tag.


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Handling and features
Performance
Verdict
Specification

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm SSM G
Sony's 'G' lenses form much of their professional range and have price tags to match. Here we'll investigate whether this popular lens is worthy of the pro price tag.

Sony's 70-300mm f4.5-5.6 G SSM lens is one of their line of professional quality lenses, sporting sturdy build quality and a fast silent focusing motor for a price tag of around £730, making it one of the most expensive 70-300mm lenses available at the moment. Here Gary Wolstenholme will investigate whether the performance and build of this lens justifies the high price tag.

This popular focal range is well catered for by third-party manufacturers with all of them offering lenses at various levels covering this range. Sigma offer a fair few 70-300mm lenses themselves, with budget lenses available from around £125. A closer comparison to a lens of this level would either be their Optical Stabilised 70-300mm which is available for around £300. Sigma also offer a professional quality lens in this range. Their 100-300mm f/4 is a much larger lens with a constant aperture of f/4, making it more suitable for lower light shooting and use with teleconverters. This optic costs around £810, which is little more to fork out though.

Tamron currently only currently offer one lens covering this range. Their budget 70-300mm costs around £130.

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Handling and features
The build of this lens strikes a good balance between sturdiness and keeping the overall weight down. The lens barrel is constructed from high-quality plastics and the fit and finish is very good indeed.

Focusing is performed internally and the SSM motor is very quick and responsive, achieving a lock very swiftly in most cases. Manual adjustments to focus can be made at any time and a handy focus lock button is provided on the side of the lens barrel to make locking and recomposing in continuous AF a breeze.

The design and quality of the build is really exemplary for this kind of lens. Little touches like the focus lock button and the general fit and finish make this lens a joy to use.

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Performance
Just like other lenses of its type, this lens performs at its best at 70mm and the resolution gradually drops off towards 300mm. I did find the amount of falloff in resolution a little disappointing though.

At 70mm this lens performs very well, producing images with good resolution across the frame at maximum aperture. Peak sharpness is at F11 where the lens performs excellently in the centre and the edges are still very good.

Zooming the lens to 135mm causes the performance to drop at every aperture, especially towards the edges of the frame. At maximum aperture performance is acceptable and peak performance is at f/11, where the resolution is very good in the centre, and approaching good towards the edges.

This lens' performance at 300mm is a little disappointing. At maximum aperture I found it difficult to achieve results I would say are truly sharp. Stopping the lens down improves the sharpness, but the lens still struggles to perform as well as I would've liked, especially towards the edges of the frame. Peak performance is at f/8, where the centre resolution is acceptable.

Resolution at 70mm Resolution at 135mm
 Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G  Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G
Resolution at 300mm  
Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G How to read our graphs
The blue column represents readings from the centre of the picture frame at the various apertures and the green is from the edges. Averaging them out gives the red weighted column.

The scale on the left side is an inidication of actual image resolution. The taller the column, the better the lens performance. Simple.

For this review, the lens was tested on a Sony Alpha A500 using Imatest.

Chromatic aberrations are kept well under control throughout the zoom range. At their worst, they just exceed 0.5pixel widths towards the edges at 300mm.

Chromatic Aberrations at 70mm Chromatic Aberrations at 135mm
 Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G  Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G
Chromatic Aberrations at 300mm  
Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G How to read out charts

Chromatic aberration is the lens' inabiity to focus on the sensor or film all colours of visible light at the same point. Severe chromatic aberration gives a noticeable fringing or a halo effect around sharp edges within the picture. It can be cured in software.

Apochromatic lenses have special lens elements (aspheric, extra-low dispersion etc) to minimize the problem, hence they usually cost more.

For this review, the lens was tested on a Sony Alpha A500 using Imatest.

Falloff of illumination towards the corners of the image is well controlled. At 70mm the corners are only 0.924stops darker than the image centre at maximum aperture. This is pretty much constant throughout the zoom range as at 300mm the amount of falloff ahas dropped to 0.89stops.

Distortion isn't much of a feature with this lens either. At 70mm Imatest recorded 0.462% pincushion distortion and at 300mm the level of pincushion raises only to 0.758%. Throughout the zoom range the pattern of distortion is uniform, so should be easy to correct if perfectly straight lines are critical.

Click on the thumbnails for a high resolution image
Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G
Above: The lens performs well at shorter focal lengths, as can be seen in this shot at 70mm.

Right: At 300mm the lens really needs stopping down a stop or two for best results.
Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM Interchangeable Lens Review: Sony 70-300mm f/4-5.6 SSM G
   

Flare and ghosting are well controlled, with strong sources of light in the frame causing a slight loss of contrast and a little flare in extreme circumstances. A deep scalloped hood is supplied with the lens which does a great job of shielding the front element from extraneous light, making sure light sources outside the frame are rarely a problem.

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Verdict
I can't help but have mixed feelings about this lens. It's built superbly, is fast focusing and has great control of falloff, distortion and flare. At shorter focal lengths it also performs very well, but to get good results at 300mm, the lens needs stopping down.

When the high price tag is taken into consideration, it leaves me disappointed, as I would personally hope for better performance at 300mm.

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Pros
Excellent build quality
Fast focusing
Good control of distortion, CA and flare

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Cons
Disappointing resolution at 300mm
High price tag for such a lens

FEATURES
HANDLING
PERFORMANCE
VALUE
OVERALL


Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM: Lens specification
Price £730
Contact www.sony.co.uk
Filter size 62mm
Format Full-frame
Construction 16 elements in 11 groups
Angle-of-view 34-8.10
35mm equivalent focal length (on APS-C body) 105-450mm
Internal focusing Yes
Image stabilisation No
Minimum focus 120cm
Maximum aperture f/4-5.6
Minimum aperture f/22-29
Weight 760g
Size 82.5x135.5mm
In the box Soft Case, Petal Shaped Hood

The Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM costs around £730 and is available from Warehouse Express here:

Sony 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G SSM

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Comments

davey_griffo Avatar
davey_griffo 14 213 165 England
30 Jun 2010 10:09PM
This is a stunning lens. The quality is fabulous, & the SSM is whisper quiet. I haven't noticed any softening of the image, but then I don't have lab testing gear, or test lenses for a living, so don't have anything to compare it to. I just know it knocks the kit 55-200 into a cocked hat.

I got mine from Jessops for £499.99 a couple of months ago. it's a steal at that price.

The only thing I found disconcerting is that the lens rattles when off the camera. It sounds just like maraccas. Whether this is some slack in the bearings that's taken up under tension of the springs when fitted I don't know, but it doesn't do it on the camera. I checked with Jessops. They had another & that rattled too, so it must be a "feature" of the lens.
JJGEE Avatar
JJGEE 18 8.1k 18 England
4 Jul 2010 1:53PM
I also have this lens, using it on the full frame A900 and like Davey I have no idea about the technical testing side of it.

No idea of the technical terms but manual focussing & zooming is quite smooth and easy to fine tune with only slight rotation of the lens barrell controls.

One of the criticisms of the review is the price tag

I bought mine 3 months ago for £659.99 and with Davey's excellent price I wonder of Gary would care to comment on the "value for money" with those prices ?
theorderingone Avatar
theorderingone 19 2.4k
6 Jul 2010 3:31PM
There's every chance that the lens I was sent was a bad copy. I only test the one lens and had to test this one a few times to be absolutely sure that the results were accurate.

In the field I found the lens really needed stopping down to at least f/8 to get decent results at 300mm, as I said in the review.

Value for money is subjective. We use Warehouse Express' current price to give a level playing field. Prices change with economic and other factors, so I can only comment on the price at the time of testing, and the performance of the tested lens.

I hope this helps?
davey_griffo Avatar
davey_griffo 14 213 165 England
8 Jul 2010 12:28PM
JJGEE - does yours rattle too?

Gary - Did your test sample?
I wasn't criticising your review, in fact quite the opposite. I've no doubt that when tested under lab conditions, or compared to other similarly priced & specced lenses, it may not be as good. I just have no way to make a comparison, other than with my previous kit lens, so it seems great to me.

Sometimes ignorance is bliss. If you don't know something's rubbish, & it is better than what you had, it seems great.

I know that you have to separate lens quality somehow, and measuring the softness is one way. But it's all relative, & may well be that the amounts are so small, that the average user (like myself) wouldn't see it anyway. Especially in isolation.
theorderingone Avatar
theorderingone 19 2.4k
11 Jul 2010 6:00PM
It did rattle a little bit, but not as much as other lenses I've tested/used before. I think it is a feature of the lens.

As you've rightly touched on, absolute sharpness isn't everything, the usability for it's intended purpose plays a big part too, making lens choices more complicated than a cut and dry 'this lens is the best' kind of thing.

One example I can think of from my own lenses is my 35mm f/2, which gets panned in reviews for poor sharpness towards the edges. But when I need 35mm and f/2 nothing else in the current Nikon line-up is a suitable substitute and I've had very good results from it.
davey_griffo Avatar
davey_griffo 14 213 165 England
16 Jul 2010 7:22PM
I'm so pleased you said that. I can stop worrying about mine being a broken lens now. You should have seen the state of the packaging when it arrived!!

You're a very helpful chap. Smile
theorderingone Avatar
theorderingone 19 2.4k
19 Jul 2010 1:33PM
You're welcome. I tries my best Smile
alanscape Avatar
12 Jan 2016 11:26PM
Looking at your test results especially at 300mm, I assume you have had a very bad copy for your test.
I have used the Tamron 70-300mm and it's not quite as good as the Sony but looking at your
test results, the Tamron is streets ahead... you really must have a poor copy as the results at 300mm
for the Sony should be better than the Tamron.
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