$3000 Lens!! Why

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone in this video i want to talk a little bit about the recently announced sony 12 to 24 millimeter g master lens i did a video on that my first impressions i was very impressed with that lens and it was interesting to me that there were a lot of people in the comments who felt that lens is very overpriced and i found that interesting to see so i thought it might be interesting to go through a little bit what i want to do is compare three lenses in this video they're all ultra wide angle lenses we're going to compare the sony 12 to 24 millimeter f 2.8 g master this is the 3 000 lens there are two much more affordable alternatives there is the sony 12 to 24 millimeter f4 g lens and there is also the sigma 14 to 24 millimeter f 2.8 dg dn art lens this comes in sony e-mount which i did a review on last fall i was very impressed with that lens it's not quite the same focal length it's close but these are essentially three ultra wide angle lenses if you look at the two alternatives the sony 12-24 f4 as well as the sigma if you round off the numbers they're like half the price you're going to pay double for the g master lens from sony and so that's what i want to get into and talk about now before i get too far into this i do want to say that all three of these lenses are quite excellent so we're comparing like fine wines here or fast cars they're all really good and they're going to get the job done but i do want to talk about why there's a significant steep price increase for something like the g master lens the dead giveaway is going to be that it's the full range of 12 to 24 millimeters at f 2.8 so when you move from a maximum aperture of f4 to f28 two things happen first of all you're going to increase the size lens you're also going to increase the weight and actually a third thing it's going to get more expensive that's just how it works the other alternative the sigma is also a 2 8 lens but it's a 14 to 24 so the give up there was that extra two millimeters on the wide end other thing worth noting here is that when i got into photography it was when i was a kid in the 80s and back in the 80s zoom lenses were nowhere near in the territory of quality of what you have today we've had better manufacturing processes we've just had advances in design they really are better it seems like when i was starting out back in the 80s zoom lenses were basically there for convenience primes were usually the better alternative but a zoom lens would give you multiple focal lengths within one lens it's something that you'd go carry around and i suppose that's still kind of where they're coming from today but they've just increased in quality so much in fact they really do kind of rival what we're going to see in prime lenses there are still some differences though zoom lenses have challenges when you start designing optics for a zoom lens and i've talked a lot about this stuff in my lens days videos before but there are some big challenges particularly with wide angle zooms or ultra wide angle zooms in this case the big three for an ultra wide angle lens i would say would be one distortion particularly at its widest setting the second one would be flare these are really wide field of view lenses and so they can't really get a big lens hood on there so anytime you have sun or bright lights in the image flare can be an issue so this comes down to how the elements are coated it comes down to how it's designed to deal with contrast so on and so forth and then i think the third biggest one is going to be field curvature this is something i've talked about in videos before but just to give you a little refresher here when we talk about depth of field when you have your lens set at its maximum aperture you're going to have your shallowest or your thinnest depth of field so wherever you put that line of focus most people assume that that line is going to be straight when indeed it's probably not and that actually is a big challenge when you're designing a zoom lens it's just nature of what comes with the territory a lot of times there is curvature involved with that it can sometimes have a reverse arc to it sometimes it has a mustache pattern is what we call it if you want to visualize this there's a little trick that i use that i got from roger sakala who runs lens rentals that is very handy what you need is you just need some texture in your image so you can take a photo in this case i took a photo of the street so we're just going to use the asphalt that's on the street it has texture to it i open the lens to its maximum aperture put the focal point right in the center of the image and make a picture you can take this into photoshop and run it through the find edges filter there are no options to this filter what it does is it looks for areas of density and sharpness in the image and so whatever sharp is going to go to black anything soft will go to white so this allows us to actually see that plane of focus and you can see where field curvature comes into play now ideally you want that straight if you're going to shoot a group of people or you're going to shoot a building some architecture particularly if you're using your maximum aperture you want everything to be in focus if it's not straight what you're shooting is straight you're going to have that focus drift and so that's one of the reasons this is important so how well do these lenses deal with field curvature i would say they all have just a little bit all of them are pretty good the weakest of the three would be the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 g lens it is going to show the most noticeable field curvature at its widest setting it looks more like the reverse arc there and as you zoom in or zoom out depending on how you want to go with that when you go from 12 when you go to 24 you start to see the mustache pattern come into play now i don't think it's the end of the world particularly on a lens this wide in general when you're shooting landscapes with this or architecture chances are you're going to be stopping down a little bit but it is interesting to be able to look at this and at least measure that within the lens now if we compare this to the sigma the sigma does an excellent job with field curvature it's fairly flat i mentioned this in my review video in fact impressively so especially when you consider it's an f 2.8 lens now the difference is the sigma is not as wide so it only goes out to 14 millimeters so you're actually missing those two millimeters if we compare this to the expensive lens now you can notice that it does really well there is a slight field curvature but of the three it's the best you also notice the density and sharpness and this isn't an accurate way to measure this an mtf would be a much better way to measure this but at least you can get a feel for the quality of the glass elements that you've got in the lens and what it's going to render like particularly at high resolutions and so the big winner here again is the g master so let's make an argument for the sigma lens for just a second first of all it is slightly shorter it is 14 to 24. i think a lot of people who just need a utility ultra wide lens who don't shoot ultra wide all the time are going to make the case that well it's just two millimeters and if you need to go wider why don't you just step back a little bit that is true and i also would say that if you are kind of casual with shooting ultra wide you don't have a large budget this actually is a pretty decent option however there is a huge difference between 12 and 14 millimeters i know it's only two millimeters but it is a massive difference and mainly it has to do with the perspective how you're going to compose there is a specific look that you're going to get with those extra two millimeters those who know they want it know that they're not going to settle for a 14 it's just how it is and so if it's one of those things i hate to say like this but if you know that that's what you need then you already know and i don't need to explain however for a good utility lens i think the sigma is an awesome choice the sony f4 version of the 12 to 24 is also a solid choice if you need that 12 millimeters because it's going to come at a much lower price point however of these three lenses this was the worst performer in terms of one distortion particularly when you're at 12 millimeters you have to be very careful about subjects that drift off of the center it starts to do weird things with lines and things and so you have to be very careful with this lens it just has a lot of distortion to it also it has an enormous amount of flare and that can be a problem if you have any kind of direct light coming into your image and so it doesn't perform as well as the other two but however i will say it is a very sharp lens i've been using one for probably about two years now and i've had excellent results with it i actually thought it was a fairly underrated lens until i had the opportunity to try the 12-24 so i actually want to quit talking about theory here and quit looking at photoshopped field curvature and i want to compare some images and talk about pros and cons which each with each one of these three lenses but really quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back in system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so let's go through each one of these options i want to look at some images and i want to talk about some of the pros and cons for each one of these ultra wide angle zoom lenses so first of all let's talk about the sigma this is the 14 to 24 f 2.8 dg dn art lens first of all one of the pros of this lens i like what sigma are doing they're designing some really excellent optics in fact impressively so when you consider the price point that is going to be a big deal for a lot of people and i think sigma with some of their art lenses like this one have provided something that really works well and it's an excellent alternative the optics are great i think the cons are first of all it is only a 14 to 24 and i already mentioned that extra two millimeters and so if that's a big deal that is going to be a con for you on this lens the second con i would mention is that this is kind of widely known but sony do not give third party vendors all of the information or access to data for auto focus in the camera it will autofocus it will be accurate you're just going to not get the speed that you get out of sony native lenses and i don't think that matters nearly as much with an ultra wide angle particularly if you're stopping down i think it's going to autofocus for you just fine but i do have to list that as a con because that's just kind of the nature of the beast so zeiss lenses sigma lenses any of the third-party lenses that support autofocus they don't have access to the full system so that's going to be another con but the price can't be beat so how about the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 j master well this one is not a bad lens i think it takes very sharp images i think for the money that it costs it's probably not quite on the same level as the sigma but it does shoot outstanding pictures i think it's a good utility lens that's the pro side the con side as i mentioned earlier we do have distortion problems we do have flare problems in fact sometimes they're pretty bad and so that's kind of a negative impact on that and when you compare this over to the g master which we're about to get into the other thing you got to understand about lenses is that in general a lens with a maximum aperture of f4 however sharp or whatever the resolution looks like on that if you have a wider aperture like a 2 8 when it stops down to f4 it probably will be sharper and that definitely is the case so let's go ahead and look at the g master the pros on this are the optics are absolutely outstanding autofocus is incredible there are actually nine special design glass elements in here the star of the show with the g master and this is where you're going to start getting into the justification of it being three thousand dollars so first of all the star of the show is that bulbus front element and when you look at a cross section of this this is what sony call an xa or extreme aspherical element it is not a design that exists in nature anywhere it is very interesting and very different it is also very extreme in terms of the curvature that it supports now this is a lens that couldn't be manufactured 10 20 30 years ago with the technology that we have it can be manufactured today and that's what sony are doing interesting fact about this lens though is when sony designed this element they realize that the nano coating that they use that is going to control contrast so on and so forth would not adhere to this extreme a curvature it just wouldn't stick and so they actually designed an entirely new nano coating process to be able to adhere coating to these elements and so this is actually really interesting because using this lens and comparing it with the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 there is a noticeable difference in things like just general contrast especially micro contrast and definitely color reproduction the g master is heads and tails noticeably better than the g version now i have not compared it directly to the 14 to 24 millimeter lens i don't have access to that lens at the moment or at the time that i had the g master but it is noticeable and this is one of the best rendering lenses i've ever seen like i said there's nine special elements in here between xa and ed elements and this is where your cost is going to come into play as well as the weight of the lens lens manufacturers use very specific types of glass in their designs it's not the same glass you have in the windows in your home you typically they use what is referred to as shot glass and by the way that's s-h-o-t not uh shot glass but anyway the glass is very important and this is what starts adding to the cost and when you start having special design elements like ed elements or xa elements that's what's going to drive the price up the cost to make the lens just goes up that's why it's a 3 000 lens and i realize that not everybody understands what goes into putting optics into a lens but that certainly is where the price comes into play i remember when zeiss released the otis lenses years ago and everybody freaked out well this is a manual focus lens we don't even have autofocus but they went to extremes it was no holds barred in terms of the glass that they were putting in these lenses and the design it was anything goes no matter what expense and as a result they are expensive lenses i think you can justify this for leica glass as well a lot of attention to detail and a lot of attention to the materials they're using goes into these lenses and that's why the cost goes up can't always say the same for camera bodies but i can say that for lenses anyway all three are great but i think the g master is exceptional i did pre-order it and i would say that if price is a factor for you then yeah if you're talking about half the price for either one of these other lenses if it's a utility lens you're gonna enjoy any one of these lenses they're all incredible however it is double the price for just a little bit better uh quality in the end on your final image but i do think it's worth it and if it were me and i was tight on cash i think i would just wait and save the money personally but that's just me your mileage may vary i would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then laterthis video is brought to you by squarespace from websites and online stores to marketing tools and analytics squarespace is the all-in-one platform to build a beautiful online presence and run your business welcome back everyone in this video i want to talk a little bit about the recently announced sony 12 to 24 millimeter g master lens i did a video on that my first impressions i was very impressed with that lens and it was interesting to me that there were a lot of people in the comments who felt that lens is very overpriced and i found that interesting to see so i thought it might be interesting to go through a little bit what i want to do is compare three lenses in this video they're all ultra wide angle lenses we're going to compare the sony 12 to 24 millimeter f 2.8 g master this is the 3 000 lens there are two much more affordable alternatives there is the sony 12 to 24 millimeter f4 g lens and there is also the sigma 14 to 24 millimeter f 2.8 dg dn art lens this comes in sony e-mount which i did a review on last fall i was very impressed with that lens it's not quite the same focal length it's close but these are essentially three ultra wide angle lenses if you look at the two alternatives the sony 12-24 f4 as well as the sigma if you round off the numbers they're like half the price you're going to pay double for the g master lens from sony and so that's what i want to get into and talk about now before i get too far into this i do want to say that all three of these lenses are quite excellent so we're comparing like fine wines here or fast cars they're all really good and they're going to get the job done but i do want to talk about why there's a significant steep price increase for something like the g master lens the dead giveaway is going to be that it's the full range of 12 to 24 millimeters at f 2.8 so when you move from a maximum aperture of f4 to f28 two things happen first of all you're going to increase the size lens you're also going to increase the weight and actually a third thing it's going to get more expensive that's just how it works the other alternative the sigma is also a 2 8 lens but it's a 14 to 24 so the give up there was that extra two millimeters on the wide end other thing worth noting here is that when i got into photography it was when i was a kid in the 80s and back in the 80s zoom lenses were nowhere near in the territory of quality of what you have today we've had better manufacturing processes we've just had advances in design they really are better it seems like when i was starting out back in the 80s zoom lenses were basically there for convenience primes were usually the better alternative but a zoom lens would give you multiple focal lengths within one lens it's something that you'd go carry around and i suppose that's still kind of where they're coming from today but they've just increased in quality so much in fact they really do kind of rival what we're going to see in prime lenses there are still some differences though zoom lenses have challenges when you start designing optics for a zoom lens and i've talked a lot about this stuff in my lens days videos before but there are some big challenges particularly with wide angle zooms or ultra wide angle zooms in this case the big three for an ultra wide angle lens i would say would be one distortion particularly at its widest setting the second one would be flare these are really wide field of view lenses and so they can't really get a big lens hood on there so anytime you have sun or bright lights in the image flare can be an issue so this comes down to how the elements are coated it comes down to how it's designed to deal with contrast so on and so forth and then i think the third biggest one is going to be field curvature this is something i've talked about in videos before but just to give you a little refresher here when we talk about depth of field when you have your lens set at its maximum aperture you're going to have your shallowest or your thinnest depth of field so wherever you put that line of focus most people assume that that line is going to be straight when indeed it's probably not and that actually is a big challenge when you're designing a zoom lens it's just nature of what comes with the territory a lot of times there is curvature involved with that it can sometimes have a reverse arc to it sometimes it has a mustache pattern is what we call it if you want to visualize this there's a little trick that i use that i got from roger sakala who runs lens rentals that is very handy what you need is you just need some texture in your image so you can take a photo in this case i took a photo of the street so we're just going to use the asphalt that's on the street it has texture to it i open the lens to its maximum aperture put the focal point right in the center of the image and make a picture you can take this into photoshop and run it through the find edges filter there are no options to this filter what it does is it looks for areas of density and sharpness in the image and so whatever sharp is going to go to black anything soft will go to white so this allows us to actually see that plane of focus and you can see where field curvature comes into play now ideally you want that straight if you're going to shoot a group of people or you're going to shoot a building some architecture particularly if you're using your maximum aperture you want everything to be in focus if it's not straight what you're shooting is straight you're going to have that focus drift and so that's one of the reasons this is important so how well do these lenses deal with field curvature i would say they all have just a little bit all of them are pretty good the weakest of the three would be the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 g lens it is going to show the most noticeable field curvature at its widest setting it looks more like the reverse arc there and as you zoom in or zoom out depending on how you want to go with that when you go from 12 when you go to 24 you start to see the mustache pattern come into play now i don't think it's the end of the world particularly on a lens this wide in general when you're shooting landscapes with this or architecture chances are you're going to be stopping down a little bit but it is interesting to be able to look at this and at least measure that within the lens now if we compare this to the sigma the sigma does an excellent job with field curvature it's fairly flat i mentioned this in my review video in fact impressively so especially when you consider it's an f 2.8 lens now the difference is the sigma is not as wide so it only goes out to 14 millimeters so you're actually missing those two millimeters if we compare this to the expensive lens now you can notice that it does really well there is a slight field curvature but of the three it's the best you also notice the density and sharpness and this isn't an accurate way to measure this an mtf would be a much better way to measure this but at least you can get a feel for the quality of the glass elements that you've got in the lens and what it's going to render like particularly at high resolutions and so the big winner here again is the g master so let's make an argument for the sigma lens for just a second first of all it is slightly shorter it is 14 to 24. i think a lot of people who just need a utility ultra wide lens who don't shoot ultra wide all the time are going to make the case that well it's just two millimeters and if you need to go wider why don't you just step back a little bit that is true and i also would say that if you are kind of casual with shooting ultra wide you don't have a large budget this actually is a pretty decent option however there is a huge difference between 12 and 14 millimeters i know it's only two millimeters but it is a massive difference and mainly it has to do with the perspective how you're going to compose there is a specific look that you're going to get with those extra two millimeters those who know they want it know that they're not going to settle for a 14 it's just how it is and so if it's one of those things i hate to say like this but if you know that that's what you need then you already know and i don't need to explain however for a good utility lens i think the sigma is an awesome choice the sony f4 version of the 12 to 24 is also a solid choice if you need that 12 millimeters because it's going to come at a much lower price point however of these three lenses this was the worst performer in terms of one distortion particularly when you're at 12 millimeters you have to be very careful about subjects that drift off of the center it starts to do weird things with lines and things and so you have to be very careful with this lens it just has a lot of distortion to it also it has an enormous amount of flare and that can be a problem if you have any kind of direct light coming into your image and so it doesn't perform as well as the other two but however i will say it is a very sharp lens i've been using one for probably about two years now and i've had excellent results with it i actually thought it was a fairly underrated lens until i had the opportunity to try the 12-24 so i actually want to quit talking about theory here and quit looking at photoshopped field curvature and i want to compare some images and talk about pros and cons which each with each one of these three lenses but really quick i want to give a shout out to our sponsor today who are the awesome folks over at squarespace.com present your photography using squarespace's modern professional portfolios the layouts are completely customizable and you can use squarespace's drag and drop based back in system which is really easy to use to present your work the way that you want it seen squarespace is an all-in-one platform for building beautiful websites easily claiming your domain or url and creating a custom site that brings your ideas to life squarespace is host to a number of other tools including e-commerce appointment scheduling and analytics so that you can grow your brand and your following so head over to squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready to launch you can go to squarespace.com aop to save an additional 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain once again that is squarespace.com aop and i want to thank the folks at squarespace for sponsoring another episode of the art of photography so let's go through each one of these options i want to look at some images and i want to talk about some of the pros and cons for each one of these ultra wide angle zoom lenses so first of all let's talk about the sigma this is the 14 to 24 f 2.8 dg dn art lens first of all one of the pros of this lens i like what sigma are doing they're designing some really excellent optics in fact impressively so when you consider the price point that is going to be a big deal for a lot of people and i think sigma with some of their art lenses like this one have provided something that really works well and it's an excellent alternative the optics are great i think the cons are first of all it is only a 14 to 24 and i already mentioned that extra two millimeters and so if that's a big deal that is going to be a con for you on this lens the second con i would mention is that this is kind of widely known but sony do not give third party vendors all of the information or access to data for auto focus in the camera it will autofocus it will be accurate you're just going to not get the speed that you get out of sony native lenses and i don't think that matters nearly as much with an ultra wide angle particularly if you're stopping down i think it's going to autofocus for you just fine but i do have to list that as a con because that's just kind of the nature of the beast so zeiss lenses sigma lenses any of the third-party lenses that support autofocus they don't have access to the full system so that's going to be another con but the price can't be beat so how about the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 j master well this one is not a bad lens i think it takes very sharp images i think for the money that it costs it's probably not quite on the same level as the sigma but it does shoot outstanding pictures i think it's a good utility lens that's the pro side the con side as i mentioned earlier we do have distortion problems we do have flare problems in fact sometimes they're pretty bad and so that's kind of a negative impact on that and when you compare this over to the g master which we're about to get into the other thing you got to understand about lenses is that in general a lens with a maximum aperture of f4 however sharp or whatever the resolution looks like on that if you have a wider aperture like a 2 8 when it stops down to f4 it probably will be sharper and that definitely is the case so let's go ahead and look at the g master the pros on this are the optics are absolutely outstanding autofocus is incredible there are actually nine special design glass elements in here the star of the show with the g master and this is where you're going to start getting into the justification of it being three thousand dollars so first of all the star of the show is that bulbus front element and when you look at a cross section of this this is what sony call an xa or extreme aspherical element it is not a design that exists in nature anywhere it is very interesting and very different it is also very extreme in terms of the curvature that it supports now this is a lens that couldn't be manufactured 10 20 30 years ago with the technology that we have it can be manufactured today and that's what sony are doing interesting fact about this lens though is when sony designed this element they realize that the nano coating that they use that is going to control contrast so on and so forth would not adhere to this extreme a curvature it just wouldn't stick and so they actually designed an entirely new nano coating process to be able to adhere coating to these elements and so this is actually really interesting because using this lens and comparing it with the 12 to 24 millimeter f4 there is a noticeable difference in things like just general contrast especially micro contrast and definitely color reproduction the g master is heads and tails noticeably better than the g version now i have not compared it directly to the 14 to 24 millimeter lens i don't have access to that lens at the moment or at the time that i had the g master but it is noticeable and this is one of the best rendering lenses i've ever seen like i said there's nine special elements in here between xa and ed elements and this is where your cost is going to come into play as well as the weight of the lens lens manufacturers use very specific types of glass in their designs it's not the same glass you have in the windows in your home you typically they use what is referred to as shot glass and by the way that's s-h-o-t not uh shot glass but anyway the glass is very important and this is what starts adding to the cost and when you start having special design elements like ed elements or xa elements that's what's going to drive the price up the cost to make the lens just goes up that's why it's a 3 000 lens and i realize that not everybody understands what goes into putting optics into a lens but that certainly is where the price comes into play i remember when zeiss released the otis lenses years ago and everybody freaked out well this is a manual focus lens we don't even have autofocus but they went to extremes it was no holds barred in terms of the glass that they were putting in these lenses and the design it was anything goes no matter what expense and as a result they are expensive lenses i think you can justify this for leica glass as well a lot of attention to detail and a lot of attention to the materials they're using goes into these lenses and that's why the cost goes up can't always say the same for camera bodies but i can say that for lenses anyway all three are great but i think the g master is exceptional i did pre-order it and i would say that if price is a factor for you then yeah if you're talking about half the price for either one of these other lenses if it's a utility lens you're gonna enjoy any one of these lenses they're all incredible however it is double the price for just a little bit better uh quality in the end on your final image but i do think it's worth it and if it were me and i was tight on cash i think i would just wait and save the money personally but that's just me your mileage may vary i would love to know what you guys think so drop me a comment below i'll see you guys in the next video until then later\n"