Sony 16-35mm F4 FE T* Lens Review & Sample Photos

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This ultra-wide zoom lens is designed for Sony mirrorless full-frame E-mount cameras. It has built-in optical image stabilization and is dust—and moisture-resistant.

My Initial Thoughts

I hate that I didn’t buy this lens sooner. It’s a perfect match for the Sony A7(r)(s) series of old and new cameras, and I love it. Even when I moved to the Nikon system, I still used this lens adapted to the Z bodies.

The lens is only F4, but I think a lens like this would be used mostly by landscape or architecture photographers, where wider apertures are not needed. However, the OSS saves the day when you need the lens in low light and when you are going handheld.

I love many things about this lens, but there are very few things I don’t, making it one of my favorite go-to lenses with the Sony A7r II.

Lens Ordering Links

Sony 16-35mm Vario-Tessar T* FE F4 ZA OSS E-Mount Lens – Amazon / BHphoto

Sony A7r II, 16mm, ISO 100, f8, 1/8sec

Real World Use

Aside from its zoom lens characteristics, this lens is fantastic even when used with the Sony A7rII’s 42-megapixel sensor. From colors to corner-to-corner sharpness, the camera’s images look amazing every time.

Tongva Garden — Tongva Park in Santa Monica, California

Sony A7r II, 16mm, ISO 100, f11, 1.3sec

What I Love About This Lens

It’s well-balanced for the Sony A7R series of cameras.
No problem with resolving 42-megapixel detail.
Very sharp at 16mm and 24mm.
Excellent coatings that create very vibrant images with fantastic color and contrast.
The lens partly blocks the Sony A7rII’s insanely bright Focus Assist Beam (wtf were they thinking?). So when I’m taking pictures of my newborn daughter, the lens blocks the death ray blast from incinerating her face and melting out her eyes.

What I Don’t Love About This Lens

I don’t like how the lens barrel extends when zooming. I prefer zoom lenses of the other style, which zoom within the barrel and do not change their basic shape.
I would rather have no OSS and a lighter lens, especially since we have in-camera stabilization.

Technical Overview

To see the Sony 16-35mm f/4 lens’s true quality, I put it through extensive testing. This should cover just about everything from diffraction and sharpness at various apertures to sun stars.

Diffraction

This varies from camera body to camera body, but here is how diffraction appears with the Sony A7R II’s 42-megapixel sensor.

It looks soft at f5.6 because I had the camera too close to the focus chart. Most lenses perform poorly at three feet or less, then become most effective at about f5.6. I was probably a foot away.

However, considering diffraction, the F11 looks great even with the Sony A7r II’s 42-megapixel sensor.

100% Crop

Sony 16-35mm F4 Sharpness at 16mm

Sony 16-35mm F4 Sharpness at 24mm

Sony 16-35mm F4 Sharpness at 35mm

Sony 16-35mm Sharpness Overview

The lens is sharp—from the center to the corners and at 16mm to 35mm. I couldn’t ask for more. There are no smeary corners, and chromatic aberrations, distortion, and vignetting are all very well controlled.

Sony cooks its RAW files with a slight correction to many of these issues and sharpens the RAWs quite a bit. So, keep that in mind when comparing it to Canon or Nikon glass via an adapter.

Sony 16-35mm F4 Sunstars And Flaring

With this lens, you won’t get great sun stars, even at higher apertures. However, pointing the camera into the sun causes very little flaring.

Sony A7rIII Walk Through Park — A walk through the park at Marina Del Rey

Sony A7r II, 16mm, ISO 100, f11, 0.6sec

Sony A7rII Park View HDR Photo — View from a park in Marina Del Rey.

Sony A7r II, 16mm, ISO 100, f11, 1/13sec

Sony A7r II, 16mm, ISO 100, f11, 1/25sec

Sony 16-35mm F4 OSS

When you put an OSS lens on an IBIS body, the lens takes priority (Some new cameras might use IBIS and OSS together, but on the older Sony cameras, it does not work this way).

The OSS in the lens is pretty good, but nothing great. It considers it more of a vibration-reduction device than a full, steady-shot simulator. Low light is decent with OSS, but I still get soft images at 1/30 shutter speed due to motion blur when shooting handheld.

OSS is a nice feature, and I see why Sony added it. OSS means the lens doesn’t need to be as fast to perform well in low-light conditions, so a slower lens is less expensive. It’s a win for everyone. (Except maybe someone who wants a shallow depth of field on an ultrawide lens and astrophotographers who need to soak up as much light as possible.)

Other Thoughts

Sony 16-35mm F4 Fly-By-Wire Manual Focusing

This isn’t a topic you usually see discussed through a lens. Since most auto-focus lenses these days have fly-by-wire focus rings, how well this technology performs can make a big difference, especially for videographers.

I have to say, the Sony 16-35mm F4’s fly-by-wire manual focus is rock-solid. It feels like you’re getting a manual lens with 1:1 performance, which is uncommon for autofocus lenses. Most of my Fujinon lenses perform very poorly with the fly-by-wire focus. I’ll experience significant focus lag when turning the focus ring. This can make getting that pinpoint focus difficult and make using the lens manual a nightmare for videographers who want instant 1:1 focus.