Review: Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G

1 day ago 5

Introduction

fe 50mm 2.5g 2.5 g sony 42mp 61mp a7rii a7riv a7riii a1 a9iii a7rv review resolution sharpness contrast bokeh vignetting coma

In early 2021 Sony released three compact fullframe E-mount lenses and this Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G is the longest of those. While many of the competitors often cut corners with their compact lenses when it comes to build quality, feature set and sometimes also optical quality, Sony decided to go for a different approach here, offering more, but also at a higher price point. Did that pay off? And is there a market for a comparably slow 50mm prime? Let’s find out in this review!

Sample Images

Most of the sample images in this review can be found in full resolution here.

Specifications

The Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G has the following specifications:

Diameter: 68 mm
Length: 45 mm
Weight: 174g (measured)
Field of view: 47° (diagonally)
Filter Diameter: 49 mm
Number of Aperture Blades: 7 (rounded)
Elements/Groups: 9/9
Close Focusing Distance: 0.31 m
Maximum Magnification: 1:4.3 (measured)
Mount: Sony E

buy from Amazon.com | Amazon.de | B&H | ebay.com (affiliate links) for $598

Disclosure

A long time reader lend me this lens for a few weeks to write this review. Thanks a lot!

Handling / Build Quality

When it comes to compact lenses manufacturers often like to cheap out on build quality and features, but Sony decided to take a different approach with their small G lenses, as we can find all the controls we are used from the GM primes: de-clickable aperture ring, AF/MF switch and lens button. If you are used to other (higher end) Sony lenses this is very nice as you will feel right at home.

The focus ring has a very nice and even resistance. It takes exactly 180° from the minimum focus distance of 0.31 m to infinity and the coupling is linear.

In the marketing material Sony also shows some pictures without the paint where you can see that the outer casing is actually made of metal. As this sample apparently has seen a lot of use you can also see the metal shining through at some of the edges.

On the left side you can find a lens button and an AF/MF switch.

At the bottom there is also a de-click lever for the aperture ring to be found.

Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G with different lens hoods

Like the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G also this Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G ships with an “interesting” looking lens hood, which I am sure offers great protection, but won’t win any prizes for great design. I decided to call it the “pimple” hood, some of our Discord members found even less flattering terms which I don’t want to share here. The owner of this lens is using the Haoge LH-245N hood (affiliate link), which apparently fits all of Sony’s three compact G lenses and looks significantly nicer. There is even enough space to add a filter under the hood.

These days there are also several E->Z mount adapters available (e.g. Neewer ETZ, Megadap ETZ21 or Techart TZE-01), that allow using this lens on a Nikon Z camera will full functionality.

Autofocus

I am not shooting sports or fast moving animals/humans so if you want to know if the lens is fast enough for this, or how it compares to other lenses in this segment, you may have to look for a different review with a more detailed assessment of this aspect.

The AF was always fast and accurate and it is also completely silent.

Vignetting

fe 50mm 2.5g 2.5 g sony 42mp 61mp a7rii a7riv a7riii a1 a9iii a7rv review resolution sharpness contrast bokeh vignetting coma

f/2.5	2.2 EV
f/4.0	1.6 EV
f/5.6	1.3 EV
f/8.0	1.1 EV
f/11	0.9 EV

When I reviewed the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G I was a bit afraid what we might discover here, as small lenses often show higher vignetting figures. But I found out they are actually comparable to other – even less compact – E-mount lenses, so what about this 50mm lens? The Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G shows pretty much the same amount of vignetting as the 40mm lens within the margin of error, not bad for such a compact lens.

It is recommended to have a look at this article first to get an idea how this brightness graph works.

Sharpness

Infinity (42mp Sony A7rII)

fe 50mm 2.5g 2.5 g sony 42mp 61mp a7rii a7riv a7riii a1 a9iii a7rv review resolution sharpness contrast bokeh vignetting coma

The Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G showed an amazing performance in this category. Will that also be the case for this slightly longer version?

Center and midframe looks great from f/2.5 and hardly benefit from stopping down, the corners are another story though. For those to match the performance over the rest of the frame stopping down to f/5.6 or better f/8.0 is needed.

In the field this shouldn’t be such a big deal, but I still wonder why the – arguably harder to design – 40mm 2.5 lens performed better here.

Portrait 1.5 m (42mp Sony A7rII)

For portraiture it isn’t so important how flat the field is, it is more interesting to see what the sharpness is like when focused at different parts of the frame to take field curvature out of the equation.

We will be looking at 100% crops from the 42mp Sony A7rII.

f/2.5 <—> f/4.0

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | 100% crops

The Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G showed an amazing performance here with a huge amount of moiré I only rarely have seen before. In a direct comparison this 50mm 2.5 G looks worse, even though it still shows a good to very good performance here.

Close 0.31 m, 1:4.3 (42mp Sony A7rII)

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | 100% crops

This Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G also offers an appealing 1:4.3 maximum magnification (which is only slightly worse than the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G with 1:4.0). At close distances f/2.5 does look a bit softer, stopping down to 4.0 already increases the performance significantly.

Flare resistance

Many of the recent Sony lenses perform really well in this category – even those with huge bulbous front elements like the Sony FE 12-24mm 2.8 GM and Sony FE 14mm 1.8 GM.

When it comes to these compact G lenses, I think some corners may have been cut though. The performance is not bad – it is actually good – but not as good as that of some of Sony’s more expensive lenses.

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | f/2.5

At the maximum aperture – and only when looking closely – you can spot some artefacts, but they are very faint and I think in actual pictures you may often not even notice them.

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | f/8.0

Stopped down these artefacts become a bit more obvious. In the lower left corner you can see small rainbow artefacts or bigger ghosts, depending on the position of the sun in the frame.

I think the 50mm is doing slightly better than the 40mm 2.5 here. Only rarely these flares will have the potential to actually ruin a picture.

Coma

100% crops from extreme corner, focused on center, Sony A7rII

There is minor coma visible at f/2.5 and f/4.0, but hardly anything you will notice when not looking at 100% crops from the corners as we do here.

Distortion

Sony A7III | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | f/11

At infinity the Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G hardly has any distortion. At the minimum focus distance this is a different story though, as I noticed very strong pincushion distortion here. For Jpegs this can be fixed in-camera, for Raw files there is a correction profile available in Lightroom that does a very good job, too. In the viewfinder the Sony cameras will also display the already corrected image.

Bokeh

If shallow depth of field photography is what you are mos interested in, you should probably have a look at one of the faster options of which there are plenty. Not everyone is a fan of such shallow depth of field though, so let’s have a closer look at the bokeh quality of this lens.

Close Distance

This 50mm lens does focus fairly close – offering a maximum magnification of almost 1:4 – and thanks to its floating elements design it is also plenty of sharp at these distances. At these distances the bokeh isn’t super smooth though, it reminds me of the Voigtländer 50mm 2.0 Apo-Lanthar E here.

Mid Distance

At mid distances I actually liked it more than at shorter distances, as the bokeh looks more unobtrusive here.

Long Distance

At longer focus distances – thanks to the moderate specifications – there will only be a limited amount of background blur. Similar to the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G the quality is alright here, no field curvature issues as we have seen from so many other compact lenses.

Sunstars

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G | slight crops

Generally, I am not a huge fan of diaphragms made of 7 aperture blades, as this usually means bad news for slightly stopped down bokeh and for sunstars.
As you can see, actually stopping down f/22 is needed to create distinct sunstars. If you prefer sunstars with wider rays you may also like those at f/11 or f/16. I have seen worse, but compared to some of the other G and GM lenses it feels like corners have been cut a bit here.
If you want to know more about sunstar rendering of different lenses have a look at this article.

Chromatic aberration

Lateral

With Sony’s AF lenses lateral CA are automatically corrected and those corrections are also automatically applied in Lightroom and cannot be turned off. I checked with the lens slightly detached from the camera to bypass those corrections and I still couldn’t find any lateral CA, so they are perfectly corrected by the optical design.

Longitudinal

Sony A7rII | Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G | 100% crops

History repeats itself here. I was already a bit disappointed with the 40mm 2.5 G’s performance in this category and this 50mm lens shows a very similar performance. Despite not being a particularly fast lens and featuring a complex optical design with two aspherical and one ED elements, I do see noticeable bokeh fringing with pretty obvious outlining.

What is more: stopping down to f/4.0 is not even enough to get rid of this aberration. I expected better here.

The Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G also had some issues with purple fringing, but interestingly here the situation is better, as there is hardly any visible, even at f/2.5.

Conclusion

good

good sharpness from f/2.5
unobtrusive bokeh at mid to long distances
fast and silent AF
build quality and handling
size/weight

average

vignetting
distortion
coma correction
flare resistance
CA correction

not good

Generally, what I have written about the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G also applies here. This Sony FE 50mm 2.5 G is a well balanced, compact lens with high resolution and contrast from f/2.5 as well as non-existent field curvature. The latter being an area where many compact lenses struggle.

I also really like that Sony decided to give this lens the full feature set of a higher end lens, something other manufacturers often like to cheap out on with their compact lenses.

There are some minor differences compared to the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G: this 50mm lens does a bit better when it comes to purple fringing and flare resistance, but it also doesn’t have that outstanding resolution and contrast from f/2.5 – still enough for any application I could think of though.

If you don’t need faster than f/2.5 in your 50mm lens this is an appealing option you can hardly go wrong with, but the competition is strong when it comes to 50mm lenses, so be sure to check out the next section first.

buy from Amazon.com | Amazon.de | B&H | ebay.com (affiliate links) for $598

Alternatives

When it comes to 50mm lenses there are a lot of options to choose from. Most of the recent E-mount ones you can find discussed in our Guide to 50mm E-mount lenses.

There are two important questions here though:

The first one is – and this was already the case for the Sony FE 40mm 2.5 G – if you wouldn’t be better off with one of the compact f/2.8 zoom lenses. There is e.g. the Sony FE 24-50mm 2.8 G which offers the same feature set, but covers the range of all three of Sony’s compact G lenses. It is more expensive than one lens, but as soon as you buy two of them the difference ain’t that big anymore. So if you are thinking of e.g. getting the 24mm and this 50mm and/or you always carry more than one lens anyway, I think the zoom would be the better choice for you as you would be more flexible while not really carrying noticeably more weight or having spent more money.

The other thing is, that there are also many faster 50mm options available, that are not necessarily more expensive. If you don’t care as much about sharpness at wider apertures and nice handling, the somewhat slow focusing Sony FE 50mm 1.8 is a stop faster, cheaper and not much heavier. For a similar price you can even get the Sony FE 55mm 1.8 ZA, a lens famous for good sharpness and nice bokeh.

So spend some time thinking what you are actually looking for in a ~50mm lens before deciding on which one to get.

Sample Images

Most of the sample images in this review can be found in full resolution here.

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My name is Bastian and I am your expert here when it comes to ultra wide angle lenses, super fast portrait lenses (ranging from a 50mm f/0.95 to a 200mm f/1.8) and I also have reviewed way too many 35mm lenses. Don't ask me anything about macro or wildlife shooting though.

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