Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 DT Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* SAL-1680Z

Name: Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 DT Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* SAL-1680Z
Brand: Sony
Rating: 8.5 (6 reviews)

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Lens Review
Specifications

16-80mm	$998 average price

Lab Test Results

Blur
Chromatic Aberration
Vignetting
Geometric Distortion

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Buy the Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 DT Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* SAL-1680Z

(From Sony lens literature) Enjoy using the professional-grade, compact, easy-to-carry Carl Zeiss SAL-1680Z lens for your next photography session. Its precise optical design will make it one of your favorites.

Introduction
The Sony 16-80mm is a Carl Zeiss branded lens featuring a Vario-Sonnar design. It uses 14 elements in 10 groups, with 3 aspherical elements and a special ''T* Coating'' to reduce flare. The lens uses 62mm filters, and the filter mount won't turn during focusing or zooming. It ships with a petal lens hood and a carrying case.

Representing the conventional 24-120mm lens in 35mm film terms, the Sony 16-80mm ƒ/3.5-4.5 is a better version of its 18-70mm ''walkaround'' lens. Going slightly wider and longer, and equipped with a better maximum aperture, it's also significantly more expensive at around $650 on store shelves.

It's important to note the Sony 16-80mm is a reduced-frame lens design, optimized for the smaller digital APS-C sensor size. This means that mounted on a full-frame film or sensor camera body, it will vignette to some degree.

Sharpness
The Sony 16-80mm ƒ/3.5-4.5 isn't the sharpest lens we've tested, but out of the current crop of consumer-grade lenses available for the Sony dSLRs, it's one of the better ones. Corner softness becomes an issue when the lens is used in a wide-angle setting with the aperture set to larger than ƒ/8.

The use of aspherical elements mitigates the corner softness at 16mm, but for whatever reason one of the worst performance points for this lens is when it is set to 24mm and ƒ/4, where it is sharp in the middle of the image and quite soft in the corners. Like most lenses in this category it is optimized for use in its most general settings, and achieves optimum performance at 35mm and ƒ/8 where it is very sharp across the frame. Diffraction begins to set in by ƒ/22, and any setting after this should be avoided, especially at any setting other than wide angle. That said, when set to a telephoto (>50mm) focal length, the sharpness (or lack thereof) is uniform across the frame.

Chromatic Aberration
The Sony 16-80mm ƒ/3.5-4.5 is built with a good resistance to chromatic aberration, where it is only a noticeable factor when the lens is set to its wide-angle setting (<24mm). At 16mm, the chromatic aberration in an image represents (at its worst, in the corners of an image) no more than 9/100 of a percent of frame height; this improves as the focal length zooms out, and some CA re-appears at the telephoto end, but no more than 6/100 of a percent.

Shading ("Vignetting")
The lens does have issues with vignetting, especially when set to wide-angle. At its worst, wide open at ƒ/3.5 and 16mm, the corners are 0.75 EV darker than the center, and at at other apertures at 16mm, the corner darkness hovers around one-third EV darker. At other focal lengths the effect is less severe, mostly around one-half of an EV darker when set to the widest aperture. At other focal lengths and apertures, corner darkness is not an issue.

Distortion
The lens deals well with distortion. As is typical of lenses with a wide-angle setting, there is prominent barrel distortion when set to 16mm, but no more than 1%. The lens is optimized well at focal lengths at 24mm and above, where distortion is negligible, and constant, throughout the remainder of the zoom range.

Autofocus Operation
The focusing operation of Sony 16-80mm ƒ/3.5-4.5 is conducted mechanically, but even with this limitation the autofocus racks through very quickly, at less than one second for the entire range.

Macro
While the lens isn't a dedicated macro lens, it holds its own in this regard, focusing quite close (163mm, 6 3/8") to the subject. The minimum field of view at this range is 101.5mm (4"), providing a magnification of 0.24x.

Build Quality and Handling
The lens is very well constructed, with a rugged plastic mechanism, that has no feeling of cheapness to it. The zoom actuation is very smooth, taking only a quarter-turn to go from 16mm to 80mm. The lens does not have an aperture ring - these are certainly going out of style - but it does have a distance scale. That said, the focus ring is quite stiff and has very little travel, perhaps 1/5 of the diameter, which makes it very difficult to manually focus accurately. You can hear the gears whirring as you turn the focus manually. Being gear-coupled, manual focus can only happen when the camera is in MF mode. That said though, at least the A700 has an AF/MF button that will let you quickly switch between manual and AF modes. The A100 lacks this feature.

The lens is fairly resistant to zoom creep, but it will creep if held pointing up or down and jostled sharply, but not if just hanging there. It would probably creep if it were swinging around at the end of a neck strap, but wouldn't be likely to move if you were simply aiming the lens up or down to get a shot.

Alternatives

Sony 16-105mm f/3.5-5.6 DT SAL-16105 ~$580
While it's not a Carl Zeiss optic, the 16-105mm produces some excellent central-frame results with some noteworthy aperture/focal length selections showing high corner softness. CA is handled a bit better, but vignetting is worse; distortion is the same.

Sony 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 DT SAL-1870 ~$170
The 18-70mm isn't as sharp as the 16-80mm, and has much worse tolerance for chromatic aberration. It vignettes a bit less; however, keep in mind it costs much less.

Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5 DC Macro ~$340
The Sigma comparable offers a lens with a slightly larger maximum aperture, but just slightly less capability in the focal lengths. Its big advantage is its macro functionality, with a close focusing distance of just 2 inches from the end of the lens. Its sharpness profile is similar to the Sony, fairs a little better with chromatic aberration, vignettes a little worse, and distorts about the same.

Konica Minolta 18-70mm f/3.5-5.6 D AF DT ~$80
You'll probably find this lens on the ''used'' shelf or on Ebay. We haven't reviewed it, but the two user reviews of this lens are fairly positive, noting that it is quite light but subject to some issues with chromatic aberration. Similarly to the Sony 16-80mm, the KM 18-70mm needs to be stopped down to achieve optimal sharpness.

Conclusion
While Sony may advertise this lens as professional-grade, its optical quality doesn't quite reach the level of what we would expect for a professional lens; sharpness is a mixed bag, performing well when stopped down to ƒ/5.6 or ƒ/8, but showing signs of significant corner softness outside of that range. The lens vignettes significantly at wide angle (16mm), but chromatic aberration and distortion are fairly well controlled. That said, for the range of focal length possibilities, and a half-stop more speed than the regular 18-70mm ''kit'' lens, the lens doesn't cost an arm and a leg, and certainly performs better.

Sample Photos!
Beginning in July 2007, we now provide sample photos of two laboratory test targets to help in our readers' evaluation of the lenses we test. The VFA target should give you a good idea of sharpness in the center and corners, as well as some idea of the extent of barrel or pincushion distortion and chromatic aberration, while the Still Life subject may help in judging contrast and color. We shoot both images using the default JPEG settings and manual white balance of our test bodies, so the images should be quite consistent from lens to lens.

As appropriate, we shoot these with both full-frame and sub-frame bodies, at a range of focal lengths, and at both maximum aperture and f/8. For the "VFA" target (the viewfinder accuracy target from Imaging Resource), we also provide sample crops from the center and upper-left corner of each shot, so you can quickly get a sense of relative sharpness, without having to download and inspect the full-res images. To avoid space limitations with the layout of our review pages, indexes to the test shots launch in separate windows.

To see the sample shots from this lens captured with this lens on our test body, just click on either of the thumbnails below, and scroll as needed in the window that appears.

Still Life shot

VFA target