I’m fairly new to modern digital photography, so being an engineer/technician, I’m a pixel-peeping geek with my new a6700/E20mm rig (on a side note - GET the Smallrig frame for your Alpha: it makes them SO ergonomic, so comfortable, like it’s part of my hand).
So here’s Sony’s ‘second-cheapest’ lens (must be strictly for amateurs, right?): so just WHAT about images from this lens makes it somehow inferior to a big-honkin, heavy, multi-thousand dollar lens? Don’t ask me: my eyeballs are about to fall out, trying to ‘find something wrong with it’.
One might say “well, being only a two-point-eight, it doesn’t have a super-bright aperture!” “Selective focus, and all, Y’know!” Kay-then: yeah - having your subjects look like they’re in dreamy-fantasy cotton candy land, with their shoulders out of focus gets old, folks.. f2.8 - or f4 - provides fine, REALISTIC focus separation, and doesn’t make your viewing audience sea-sick. Five-point-six is perfection on this thing, for real-world looking images: and there’s STILL beautiful, subtle, ‘real-world’ focus separation.
I read a review on this lens that had me a little scared. There was a close-focus, WAY cropped-in (pixel-peeping) image of a watch face, that showed significant chromatic aberration: I can’t duplicate that; it’s way-sharper than that, wide-open - and f4? it’s razor-sharp, by any reasonable pixel-peeping scrutiny.
So I made a landscape shot. On my Mac Retina screen, I zoomed and zoomed way-in, down to pixel-level. Keeping in-mind, now, that I have the sharpness/clarity stuff turned practically-OFF in my settings: I found tiny twigs which happened to be straight-vertical, that were exactly a nice, high-contrast, one-pixel-wide. The acuity of this optic definitely exceeds the resolution of a 26M sensor array.
The small size and light weight makes this 6700 body - along with the Smallrig frame - just a beautiful, balanced TRULY portable setup.
I dinged it a point because the lense shade - while providing excellent protection for the lens - doesn’t really work for veiling flare mitigation.
Don’t let internet reviews scare you too much. There’s nothing in this lens that could keep your photographs from world-class territory. If you need more ‘sharpness’ than this E 20mm, better get a Hasselblad body or something, to be able to actually demonstrate it.
