This is the 300mm f/2.8 G Master,
a lens that I've been waiting 10 years for Sony to make.
Let's get undone. (upbeat music)
♪ Gerald undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening, everybody?
I'm Gerald Undone and I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
Alright, for disclosure,
Sony lent me this lens to make this review.
I don't get to keep it.
No money changed hands
and Sony does not get any input on this video's production
or get a preview before it's posted.
This video does have an actual sponsor though
and that Storyblocks.
So a fun coincidence that I alluded to in the intro
is that almost exactly 10 years ago,
when we were still shooting hockey,
I was researching a lens like this
and we ultimately went with the Canon 300mm f/2.8,
because Sony didn't really have anything
even remotely like that in their lineup.
So it's kind of fun that 10 years later I can finally look
at a Sony version of this lens,
even if I don't have a need for it these days.
But the first thing I noticed when picking up this lens
especially when compared to that old Canon,
is how much lighter this lens is.
It's clocking in at 1470 grams,
which is three and a quarter pounds,
which is nearly two pounds lighter
than that Canon lens that we used to use.
And actually even when I handed the lens to Lindsey,
shout out to Lindsey by the way,
she's operating the zoom on this video here.
Her first reaction, and she's not even that familiar
with these super telephotos or whatever,
was "Wow, that's a lot lighter than I expected."
It just, it looks heavier than it's gonna be.
When you put in your hands, i's surprising light.
I think they said it's similar to the original 70 to 200
in terms of weight.
So it's surprising.
And the way that they accomplish this in part
is that the optical formula is different.
Rather than putting-- they reduced the amount of elements
toward the front of the lens
and have kind of crammed everything
into the rear section here,
which not only does it reduce the weight,
but it also helps a lot with the balancing
because say you're to support the lens here,
you feel like you have not only a really good balance
on the entire setup,
but then all the weight is now in this hand.
So you feel really agile with it.
And they're definitely, in my brief anyway,
they mentioned the capabilities of using this handheld
more than being restricted to a monopod,
where again in that previous setup that I used to use
for sports, it was always on a monopod
because the whole setup was heavy.
But this really does feel like a handheld combo
and we'll talk more about that when I show you
some handheld shots and stuff that we did
with the stabilization.
Let's go over the rest of the build
starting from the front toward the back.
So there's a new lens hood design in this one.
You've got your push button release here,
comes off really nice and smooth.
Goes on, feels well made.
It's really light,
so it doesn't upset that balance thing too much.
And you're definitely gonna wanna rock this lens hood
most of the time.
This front element, not only is it crazy expensive
so you definitely don't wanna damage it,
but there's no front filters for this lens.
So the only way that you can protect your lens
is by using the hood.
It does have this thing when it comes to lens caps,
which is you know, more of a fabric cover
that is well padded and will protect the lens
especially when you're putting in storage.
But nothing in terms of conventional,
quick getting it off and on protection.
So definitely rock the hood.
Now if we move further down
you can see that we have four focus hold
or function buttons all the way around the lens.
And then they've got this really cool function ring here
which only turns a little bit
in each direction and then stops.
But you can set it to two different things in the menu.
The first one is you can set it to be a constant focus.
So you would just sort of toggle it in one direction
and it would give you a very steady focus
and then you could toggle the other direction
and focus it back.
So you could use it for a smooth focus pull if you wanted
or on the menu you can change it to be,
it switches between APS-C and full frame,
which is actually pretty rad
if you wanna quickly, it almost feels like
a 1.5x instant zoom.
So you would just go like that,
now you're 1.5x zoom.
Go like that, you're back to full frame
on a body that supports that obviously.
And then the rest of this is all the focus ring here.
And it's okay as far as dampening goes.
I feel like it's maybe a little bit sloppy,
maybe it's just because it's so big,
it feels lighter than I would expect,
but it is completely linear, which is nice.
And the focus throw is about maybe,
I don't know 135 degrees or so.
So it's a little bit short,
but it's nice that there's a properly linear manual focus
on this lens.
And there's a switch for full-time DMF below the AF/MF switch
that allows you when enabled to basically have
a constant focus override.
So you would autofocus and then you could adjust it slightly
if you wanted by turning this.
And when it comes to autofocus, it's blazing fast.
It has two of the XD linear motors
which are that sort of like maglev system.
So it's Sony's best and probably the best in the business.
It's instant pretty much and it's completely silent,
which is great and handy depending on if you're shooting
certain sports, certain wildlife, you're gonna want that.
And then there is a switch on the side here for autofocus.
That toggles between full or six meters to infinity.
Once set to full it'll go all the way down
to 2 meters or 6.5 feet,
which is the minimum focus distance.
The whole lens is dust and moisture resistant.
The collar is built into the lens so it doesn't come off,
just the foot comes off if you wanna remove that.
And then because it doesn't take front filters,
it has the rear 40.5 mm filter holder
that you can use on the back of the lens here.
And this lens is also compatible
with Sony's 1.4 and 2x teleconverters.
Okay, I think that's about it as far as the build goes.
Let's take a look at Lightroom
and I'll show you some of the sample images.
Okay, so first up here
let's talk about chromatic aberration.
I have a shot here where if I zoom in
we can take a look at the areas as they go out of focus
in either direction to look for color fringing,
longitudinal chromatic aberration.
And there definitely is some,
I can see fringing in both directions.
But I-- similar to when we looked at
the ARRI Signature Prime lens recently,
this lens has a better color combination for it.
Rather than the bright green and bright magenta,
it's more of an amber color when you go this way
and more of a sort of navy blue in this direction
which is much more natural when it sort of fades
into the real world.
100% zoom.
If you can't really see it,
you're probably in pretty good shape.
And I took this image as well
to just kind of illustrate white background.
Can you see anything weird on the screwdriver as we go down?
What about on the top of the monitor
or does it just look kind of black and white?
And if so, I think it's a pass.
Now this next one here is to show the minimum focus systems
we talked about, the maximum reproduction.
The magnification of this lens is 0.16x.
So nothing to write home about.
This is what a Rubik's cube looks like when focused
as close as you can focus.
Next up, let's talk about bokeh.
If we look at this orb here,
we can see there's not a lot of junk inside.
It looks pretty smooth.
The outer membrane is pretty well controlled as well.
Don't really have a lot to complain about
in terms of the texture.
I think they look really nice, really round.
We do have some significant sort of cat's eye and cutting in.
If we skip ahead to this image,
you can see that it can get pretty significant
depending on how you're framing up your shot.
If we stop down to f/5.6, it's pretty much resolved though,
and we can see that we have an 11-bladed iris.
Next up here we have some barn boards to look at
vignetting and distortion.
Distortion is incredibly well controlled
and so is the vignetting.
Of course, this'll have profiles to make sure
that the vignetting and distortion is, you know
controlled in your camera when you put on the profile.
So it's not really something I'd really worry about
because it'll even be applied to video
if that's what you're trying to use it for.
Only time it does is if you're adapting.
Don't buy this lens to adapt it, that's weird.
But yeah, the vignetting and distortion is both great
in this shot.
And then we have one for sharpness.
So when focused here in the center,
let's do a crazy, you know, 200% zoom or something.
We can see, you can see all the little squares
of the playing card.
Like it is incredibly sharp.
And what's great about it's that you go to any corner
and you can, like the sharpness all the way
from the extreme edge to edge is phenomenal on this lens.
And it seems to be well centered as well.
It's not like one corner seems to be worse
than the other, which is nice.
And I saw the MTF charts for this lens
and they're like pretty much straight across
and then only dipped down to like, you know
95% at the edge, which you can't really even see.
I mean maybe this is slightly softer
than the center of the lens, but yeah,
just really, really nice contrast on the Ace of Spades too.
Looks great.
Next up, obligatory photos of my kitty cats.
Now this is an example of when the bokeh
is exactly what we want.
It's just a creamy blur in the background
and we're drawn to the subject
and it doesn't really matter, you know
you're not seeing cat's eyes in the,
okay, well in this case you actually,
you are seeing cat's eyes 'cause it's a photo of a cat.
But you know what I'm saying
there's no distracting, you know, swirly bokeh.
But if we punch into the... I mean, wow!
Like look how sharp this is.
This is, it's crazy sharp.
I can see the individual hairs in his eyelashes.
Next up regarding stabilization.
Now I did this test twice.
I did a run of photos
and then I got Lindsey to do a run of photos
because she has less experience holding
a big telephoto lens.
So as we got slower and slower shutter speeds,
we could, it's not just providing you my data point,
I also provided it from somebody who maybe,
she's a lot smaller, it's harder for her to hold a lens
like this.
What I found is that for me
the image became unusable around 1/20th of a second,
which is really slow for a 300mm lens.
This is obviously with stabilization turned on.
Now there are two switches on the lens
that control stabilization.
One turns the OSS off and on
and the other one is the one, two, and three modes.
Mode one is normal, mode two is for panning,
and mode three is for like erratic subjects
where you have to, you know
you move the lens around a lot.
I had it just on one on
and that's the mode that I am talking about here
in these test images.
So yeah, all the way down to 1/20.
And I found that that's when the text
is starting to get a little bit blurry as you can see.
But by the time I get up to even say 1/60th of a second,
it's pretty much perfect.
So I feel comfortable handholding this lens
down to 1/50th, 1/60th of a second.
Then for Lindsey, I felt like 1/125th was as slow
as I would probably go because when we got down
to 1/60th here, I am starting to see a little bit of blur.
And then if we go down to 1/30th,
it's, this is pretty much unusable.
But here's an interesting sort of prover
of what I was talking about.
I was out doing a photo walk in the woods with this lens
and I was shooting something over here
where I was leaning it on a tree stump
and I had it down to 1/25th of a second.
And then I was walking this direction
I saw a squirrel and I quickly tried to take a photo of it
without changing my shutter speed.
And I didn't realize afterwards
that I was still on 1/25th of a second.
But while there is some like it's not tack sharp, obviously,
but this is at 1/25th of a second.
No preparation, just turning, focus, shoot.
Like the result is pretty good.
If you're not punched in, it looks pretty sharp.
So the stabilization is great on this lens.
But to give you sort of a live demo of the stabilization
turning on and off because I feel like it's
a pretty dramatic effect,
I'm just gonna point this at my Storyblocks blanket
over there and you can see how I'm holding the lens.
I'm not being supported by anything,
I'm holding it like this.
I'm choked up a little bit more than I normally would
because I want to be able to switch the OSS on.
You can see it's moving quite a bit.
And now if I flick the switch on,
you can see it pretty much just locks off immediately.
And that's great.
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Focus breathing on this lens isn't great.
You can see significant changes in your field of view
as you focus from MFD to infinity.
The lens does support focus breathing compensation
on the bodies that have that function,
but it still doesn't solve the breathing completely
and it remains quite noticeable.
So this is a great example
of the creamy bokeh out of focus area,
but you can start to see a little bit
of that sort of swirl that I'm talking about
caused by the cat's eyes, but it still looks great,
draws your eye into the subject, as intended with this lens.
A couple more shots.
Really, really sharp.
Looks great.
Punch in here.
Yeah, no issues.
You can see all of his little eyebrows and everything.
It's super sharp, looks great across the frame.
But if we jump ahead to theses shots
that were in the woods with trees and leaves
and everything around,
now you can start to see how maybe the bokeh
could be a little bit distracting.
It's not a big deal,
but it depends on the subject and what you're shooting.
You see how it kind of has a directionality to it
almost like it's creating this sort of like swirly arch?
I would say it's even more significant in this shot.
Now still as well the isolate
and you still draw your eye on 'em,
but there is a bit more of this kind of like, you know
warpy trippy kind of thing going on,
which became more prevalent
whenever there was a lot of stuff in the scene.
And I took this photo just purely to illustrate
this example of this.
You see how it just looks like there's almost like I said,
like a direction to it,
like it's swooping around in the background.
This photo annoys me by the way.
I took it specifically to showcase this aspect.
But then when I was looking at it in post,
like I focused here and then I realized afterwards,
I was like, why didn't I focus on this leaf?
It would've been such a better image
if I'd focused on this leaf
instead of just this hunk of wood here.
You guys ever do that?
You look at a photo afterwards
you're like, oh, that was such a better focus point.
Why did I focus over here?
I'm an idiot.
Okay, what else do we got here?
Flare. I actually find it to be a little bit of a problem,
but only in certain situations.
I recommend you have the hood on all the time
which is going to minimize the angles
that flare is even gonna be an issue.
It is a G Master, which means it has the coatings
and stuff like that.
But I do find the flare despite that to be aggressive
on this lens.
Again, it only shows up in certain angles,
but if you do manage to get it... Woo.
As you can see here,
it put a crazy blue just all over the entire frame
to where you can't even really see what's going on in it.
Like, I dunno why you'd be shooting your siding like this,
but if you were, and the sun was here,
it just completely, it just obliterates the frame
as you can see.
So you're gonna wanna avoid,
don't buy this lens for shooting into the sun
basically is what I'm trying to say.
Can you see this like massive sort of blue
just no contrast circle going on here?
Yeah, I mean this kinda looks a little bit pretty actually,
but don't point at the sun with this lens.
It's nothing but bad results.
Here's something I was really impressed by.
There are no edits to this image whatsoever,
but look at how punchy these colors are,
how great the contrast is.
Look at the edge of this leaf,
just like how clean that edge is
and how like creamy the background is and how sharp,
you know you're not seeing chromatic aberration
or any kind of issues at all in a practical shot like this
even when I'm 160% zoomed in.
Now I don't fancy myself much of a bird photographer,
but I figured it was required to take at least one photo
of a bird while using a lens like this.
So I found this tiny little
I think this is a woodpecker.
This is what he looks like.
Again, really sharp, really nice.
Got another strange type of bird
that I took a photo of here.
Again, really sharp, nice contrast
just really pops, looks great.
And then one more picture of a squirrel,
which again I thought turned out great.
Really, really sharp.
Great detail.
Super impressed by this.
Like the transition from it to the background.
Really clean, really nice edge.
And these were all shot with the a1 by the way,
that's usually what I use for these lens tests.
Lastly, I just have two images that I think show
a couple of the little weaknesses with this lens.
Use cases where you know
you might not be pleased with the results.
This one is about specular highlights.
These tiny little white circles here.
If we punch right in on them,
they actually do have quite a bit of
obvious chromatic aberration on them.
But again, we're punched in significantly here
in order for you to see that.
At a distance like this, I mean, who's using a 300mm lens
to take this shot anyway,
but I just wanna show you that the little speculars,
if they happen to be in your scenes a lot,
do have noticeable fringing on them.
And then the other one is,
if you like to do stuff like this
where you create your little abstract worlds
by close focusing, struggle with little aberrations
that kind of make them look softer and glistening.
I would call this image a pass.
Like I wouldn't complain that much about these little,
this little character here,
but I would say that mixed with the little soap bubbly
kind of bokeh in the foreground,
it's a bit busy and it's a little bit soft.
So maybe not, maybe this isn't your best use case
for a lens like this, obviously.
I mean, you know, why would you buy a 300mm 2.8
and then shoot stuff like this?
Just use a 35.
But anyway, those are the only two instances
where I thought, eh, kind of weaker performance
for the price category.
But again, where this lens really shines
and what it's best used for is isolating a subject
and getting an incredibly sharp image of that subject.
It really is a terrific lens.
You know, it excels at what it's supposed to do.
And I think that if you're getting it for that purpose
you're gonna be really pleased with the results.
But I'm curious, audience,
are you looking for a 300mm lens?
Because like I said for me it's been 10 years
since I was shopping for one,
so I'm not really sure what the demand is like
for a Sony shooter for a lens like this.
You know, I'd just kind of gotten used to the fact
that there is no 300mm for Sony
and have made do with other focal lengths.
Are you in the same boat
or are you really excited about a lens like this?
Let me know in the comments.
I'm curious to know what you think
and thanks for watching the video.
Hope it was helpful for you, and yada, yada yada.
Alright, I'm done. (upbeat music)