SEL1855
3.2
5
5
5
Decent Lens
A much aligned lens, but in daily use does the job you expect of it. Assuming your not a pro, using this as your only lens, but rather the family memory keeper or amateur photographer, the vast majority of us, it provides reasonable sharpness, nice color and ok bokeh. The build quality is top notch, it handles well and is perfectly sized for the Nex 7. Looking at the whole package I would say one of the better 18-55mm lenses on market. Yes I can tell the difference between this and the 24mm Zeiss, but that lens costs 5 times this one. Use a good editing program like Lightroom 3 or 4 to get the best out of this lens. I would have voted 3.5 if I had the option.
April 27, 2012
Poor Sharpness
I use this lenses with my NEX 5N camera and have been somewhat disappointed with it's performance. Most of the photos with this lens lack clarity and sharpness throughout the photo. I do a lot of landscape and cityscape so many of my photos are at infinity focal length. This seems to be where the lens performs at it's worst. The resulting photos are very dull focus throughout, even with an aperture above f22.
The barrel distortion is excessive on this lens which is expected at 18mm but the distortion continues throughout almost the whole zoom range.
I wish Sony would offer a wider range of Zeiss prime options or even some G series lenses in E mount as it makes my camera very limiting unless I choose to use the A mount adapter which kind of negates the whole reason I bought this camera (compact size).
April 7, 2012
Poor Lens with NEX-7
This lens under certain conditions will get center sharpness with the NEX-7, but overall the lens is overwhelmed by the 24meg pixel sensor. Anything beyond the center has little to recommend, since the lens has no sharpness.
If doing it over, I wouldn't bother purchasing this lens for the NEX-7, because it's not worth the money.
March 24, 2012
Fantastic kit lens
This is a wonderful kit lens capable of producing excellent images of professional quality.
Now I'm not comparing this lens to the Carl Zeiss $1,000 lens (I can't compare since I don't own one and don't plan on buying such an expensive one since I'm happy with the kit lens), but considering the cost of this lens ($100 with the kit or $300 retail) you can't do much better.
Machining, fit, and feel are excellent as well.
December 11, 2011
