The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS Lens Review

Some lenses just make sense.

For portrait photographers, a good telephoto lens is a must. At focal lengths between 80mm and 135mm approximately, portraits are usually more flattering due to the compression effect associated with telephoto lenses. Besides that, the ability to frame the shot exactly as desired without changing your working distance saves a ton of time and offers increased versatility.

For landscape photographers, the ability to reach far into the horizon while maintaining excellent optical quality is a huge boost in convenience. Landscape shots taken at 200mm or close are able to show tons of detail while still conveying an impressive sense of scale. City skylines and mountaintops look mighty, and multiple-picture panoramas can be breathtakingly detailed.

For sports photographers, the ability to see right into the arena, where the action unfolds, is like bread and butter. Coupled with the increased reach, and fast and reliable autofocus of a crop-sensor camera, a fast-focusing lens that can get you right there is a huge asset to have.

These are just a few of the most popular scenarios where telephoto lenses shine, but there are plenty more. For that reason, the 70-200mm lens has long been a staple in the arsenal of the working photographer: like a violinist’s bow, it almost becomes an extension of their own body.

When it comes to 70-200mm lenses, practically every camera system offers two distinct flavors: a smaller, lighter f/4, and a massive, fast f/2.8. Some argue that these two lenses represent the difference between amateur and professional shooters, but the reality of it as a lot more nuanced, as you’ll hopefully see throughout this review.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS lens is Sony’s first take on the popular 70-200mm formula for the Full Frame E-mount system — or FE system, for short. It was released in mid-2014, and it’s an extremely competent lens. For a year and a half, it was the only 70-200mm lens for the FE system, but let’s address the elephant in the room for one second.

In early February 2016, Sony announced the Sony FE 70-200mm F2.8 GM OSS lens, which completes their lineup in this focal range. It’s also the new flagship lens in the entire system, so some of you may understandably be wondering about it.

For what it’s worth, if you need the extra stop of light, the GM lens appears to be incredibly solid, at least on paper. Pricing for the lens is still unannounced as of this review’s publication, but past history suggests it will be priced significantly upwards of the f/4 version, and maybe even north of $3,000, which is double the cost of the f/4.

However, as great as the new GM lens may be, those with more terrenal needs will be glad to know that the f/4 lens is an incredible performer in its own right, and still well worth your consideration.

Let’s take a look at it in a bit more detail.

Build quality and ergonomics

The Sony 70-200mm F4 lens belongs to the G-series of lenses, which is Sony’s designation for professional-level glass, and was their highest lens rating available up until the recent announcement of the G-Master series.

Marketing terminology aside, the G means Sony designs and produces these lenses with the utmost regard for quality. Indeed, the FE 70-200mm F4 lens has an all-metal exterior, including body and mount. It is also weather sealed, being rated by Sony as “dust and moisture resistant”. This translates in practice to excellent performance and handling in the field in a wide range of conditions.

The lens features two rings and multiple controls for some of its advanced features. Both rings are generously wide and both are covered by textured rubber to ensure they always remain sufficiently grippy, even in colder conditions.

The front ring is the focus ring and is the narrower of the two. It has a nice feel and it’s very smooth to turn. It doesn’t appear to have any buildup tension in the beginning of the focusing motion, making very small focus adjustments a breeze.

The back ring is the zoom ring and is considerably wider than the focus ring. It offers more resistance than the focus ring, but it’s similarly smooth and easy to adjust with precision. It turns clockwise — looking from the camera — to increase focal length, and counterclockwise to reduce it.

This is also a non-extending zoom lens, meaning it doesn’t physically extend in length as you zoom. This makes sealing the lens a lot easier, and it also eliminates the risk of zoom-creep, which is what happens when a lens accidentally extends on its own when facing downwards due to the weight of its front elements.

The front element is quite wide and has a filter thread of 72mm. This is a bit on the large side, but is a very popular size shared by other lenses in the FE system. If you’re planning to build a lineup of FE lenses, you should always buy your filters in the size of the biggest lens you’re planning to get, and use step-up rings to avoid having to buy the same filters multiple times.

The lens also features five different switches. Two of them control the focus mode, and the other two control the built-in image stabilization — or Optical SteadyShot (OSS), as Sony calls it.

The switch at the top changes between AF and MF modes, and the one below it allows you to select the focus range: from 3 meters to infinity, or the entire focus range. Selecting the appropriate region helps the lens be faster and more accurate at focusing.

The third switch turns OSS on and off, and the last one selects the stabilization mode: 1 to compensate for normal motion, and 2 to compensate for horizontal panning motion. This is a very nice feature, but it’s extremely poorly labeled, to the point where it is actually impossible to know what the switch does unless you’ve read the manual — always read the manual, dear friends — or someone else points out to you how it works, or you look it up on the Internet. Guess which one I opted for.

There are also three focus hold buttons on the lens, which can come in pretty handy when you’re changing your framing, or if you use the focus-and recompose technique. Just be sure to be sufficiently stopped down if you do this, because even at f/4, depth of field is surprisingly thin in this focal range, especially the closer you get to 200mm.

Included with the lens is also a plastic hood, which is more than adequate for the job without substantially increasing the overall weight of the lens. It’s covered by a matte felt-like material on the inner side, which helps absorb excessive light and fend off reflections even more. The hood is also reversible for easy storage, which is yet another nice design touch in the lens.

The Sony FE 70-200mm f4 comes bundled with a metal tripod collar that is super easy to mount and unmount thanks to its great clamp mechanism. With the collar, the lens is slightly front balanced, but that won’t be a problem as soon as you factor in the weight of the camera body. Indeed, the combination of this lens and a Sony α7 II camera is very maneuverable when both are mounted on a tripod head by the lens collar. If you used the tripod mount on the camera body instead, the combination would be so front-heavy that it would be extremely uncomfortable to handle.

Unfortunately, the collar does add a bit of bulk to the lens, and since it’s not collapsible and weirdly shaped, it’s not easy to store in your bag. To avoid messing with it and maybe even losing it, I recommend you leave it on the lens at all times, unless you’re positive you won’t be using your tripod at all that day.

Finally, there’s the matter of the lens cap. Sony makes, without a doubt, the worst lens caps in the entire photographic industry. The front cap that comes with this lens is laughably flimsy and weak. Sometimes it doesn’t stay on, other times it gets stuck and there’s no way to remove it. Dealing with the cap is a constant struggle and a serious source of frustration on a regular basis. I mean it, Sony: get your act together on this, it’s not rocket science.

Ergonomics-wise, and once you get rid of the front cap, this lens is a dream. It’s relatively small and light for a 70-200mm lens, especially when used without the hood and tripod collar, and it’s so well built that you can handle it without gloves, worry-free.

The two rings are sufficiently distinct that getting them mixed up while shooting is absolutely not a problem, especially once muscle memory kicks in, and the convenience of the multiple switches and buttons is hard to overstate.

All in all, this is a very solid lens well worthy of Sony’s G-series rating, and certainly deserving of a place in every photographer’s bag.

Manual focus

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS lens uses a focus-by-wire mechanism. That means the focusing ring is not mechanically linked to the focusing system, which is instead operated electronically. Manual focus users tend to prefer lenses with actual, hardware-based manual focus implementations, like the Zeiss Loxia line, but this lens still manages to offer an excellent MF experience thanks to the many focusing aids built into modern Sony cameras.

When used in combination with features like focus peaking and magnification, it’s pretty easy to nail focus every time with this lens, and with a bit of practice it’s entirely possible to obtain results that are even competitive with the AF system. This is especially true in low light scenarios, where the AF system tends to hunt a little bit.

Keep in mind that at longer focal lengths, depth of field is quite shallow despite the lens’s moderate maximum aperture of f/4. Thus, relying on focus peaking alone might not be accurate enough to reliably achieve critical focus. I strongly recommend using magnification to confirm your focus whenever possible.

The focusing ring feels perfect to the touch. Resistance is just right, and it’s super easy to fine-tune focus by making slight adjustments. Despite this being a focus-by-wire design, it’s extremely well executed.

It appears the only thing that’s missing here is a depth of field scale and hard focus stops. That means you will need to keep an eye on the EVF or the LCD screen, so this lens will be unsuitable for those who like to use the zone focusing technique. In this focal range, however, that technique is a lot less reliable anyway, so it’s an understandable omission. Overall, the manual focus experience with the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens is top notch.

Autofocus

Autofocus performance is very, very good with this lens in good light, especially considering the additional challenges that come with focusing a lens this big and heavy.

The 70-200mm F4 lens achieves focus very quickly in pretty much any sort of scene, provided there are at least a few contrasty lines to help the AF system figure out where to focus. AF performance slows down a bit in dimmer conditions, as with most lenses, but remains perfectly usable in all but the darkest settings.

Focus accuracy is also excellent, even towards the long end of the zoom range and at medium to far focusing distances, where accuracy is most difficult to achieve. If you intend to use it for wildlife photography in combination with a crop-sensor body, this lens will not disappoint.

The minimum focusing distance is rated as 1 meter at the 70mm end, and 135 cm at the 200mm end, which is about par for the course for this type of lens. Therefore, its macro abilities are nothing to write home about.

By setting the camera to AF-C mode and with subject tracking turned on, the lens is able to accurately track moving subjects in everyday situations when used on a Sony α7 II camera. Tracking performance may vary slightly when used on different camera bodies, but it should remain good enough to track most subjects.

Even when shooting moderately fast action sports, like rubgy, the lens is usually able to track focus reasonably well. Keep in mind that in this particular scenario, much of the responsibility falls on the camera body, and this is an area where mirrorless cameras have traditionally struggled vs DSLRs. The Sony Alpha α6000, however, and the newly announced α6300, should be able to deliver impressive tracking performance with this lens in most situations.

In dimmer conditions, the lens is slightly slower to focus, but it’s still darn impressive. If you’re having trouble focusing with this lens at close distances, verify that you have the focus region switch set to FULL. It’s easy to set this to the other position and forget, in which case the lens will refuse to lock focus onto anything thats 3 meters away or closer.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 is essentially silent when focusing, which makes it ideal for situations when a loud whirring sound might not be appropriate. It also makes the lens very well suited for video recording.

Speaking of which, if you expect to use this lens primarily for video, you’ll be glad to know it doesn’t suffer from focus breathing at all. When a lens “breathes” it means the field of view changes as you focus closer to infinity. With the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens, the field of view remains the same regardless of the focus point.

Image quality

Being one of Sony’s much-touted G series of lenses, image quality ought to be nothing short of superb and in this aspect, the FE 70-200mm F4 lens doesn’t disappoint.

The lens has 21 elements in 15 groups, which is a lot of glass. It also has two advanced aspheric elements, one aspheric, one super ED element, and two ED elements. All of these supposedly give it great resolution across the frame and a pleasing bokeh, while controlling aberrations. Let’s see how much of it is actually true.

Sharpness

Sharpness across the frame is excellent throughout the zoom range. At the 200mm end and far focusing distances, sharpness may decrease slightly, although the lens still manages to maintain very good resolution. The sweet spot for sharpness lies between 80mm and 135mm, which is the recommended focal range for portraits. Here the lens is impressively sharp across the frame.

At close to moderate focusing distances, the corners will always be a bit softer due to field curvature, which is moderate with this lens. You can clearly appreciate the effect in the image samples below. Once you focus on more distant subjects, however, this problem becomes less pronounced and the corners sharpen up rather nicely.

At 70mm:

At 70mm, the center of the frame is already quite sharp wide open, and it doesn’t have much room to improve upon stopping down. The corners are also very good, but these improve more noticeably when the lens is stopped down. Field curvature is apparent when refocusing in the corner.

At 100mm:

At 100mm, the lens gets even sharper in the center, and the corners are also a bit better. Field curvature is still pronounced.

At 135mm:

At 135mm is where the lens is at its sharpest. Both the center and the corners are impressive here. Once again, field curvature is definitely apparent.

At 200mm:

At 200mm, resolution is slightly lower across the frame, but still very good all things considered. Field curvature continues to be noticeable at close to moderate focusing distances.

The only dip in resolution occurs at 200mm and far focusing distances, but even that is a very minor dip indeed. This doesn’t take away from the lens’s impressive performance all throughout the rest of the zoom range. Sharpness-wise, there is nothing to complain about here, really.

Field curvature is an issue that all lenses contend with, and although in this case it never really goes away, its effects are minimized when working with distant subjects. In the real world, people don’t usually take pictures of perfectly flat subjects, so this is usually not a huge problem.

Do keep in mind that the above image samples were exported directly from RAW and were not processed in any way, other than by applying the built-in lens profile correction. No amount of sharpening was applied in Lightroom. With a normal post-processing workflow that includes a moderate amount of sharpening, your images should be noticeably sharper.

Similarly, if you shoot JPEG, you can expect the lens to deliver sharper images thanks to the automatic sharpening that is applied to JPEGs in camera.

Bokeh and depth of field

Bokeh is a term that refers to the aesthetic quality of the out of focus areas in an image, not the extent to which they’re out of focus. Some factors that typically affect the bokeh of a lens are the number and grouping of its optical elements, the number of aperture blades it has, and whether those blades are rounded.

As mentioned before, the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens has 21 elements in 15 groups, including two advanced aspheric elements and one aspheric. It also has 9 rounded aperture blades.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens has very nice bokeh throughout the entire focal range. It’s a bit swirly, but not in a nervous manner. And since it’s a telephoto lens, you can still achieve a nice amount of subject separation despite the modest maximum aperture of f/4, especially at close focusing distances.

In fact, once you get past 135mm or so, depth of field starts getting so thin that ensuring your subject is properly in focus can be a bit challenging sometimes.

Out of focus highlights display some faint onion rings, but these are less pronounced than in most other lenses. This may be due to Sony’s use of advanced aspherical elements in the lens. The highlights are circular across most of the frame, and only take a bit of a cat’s eye shape in the extreme corners.

Color rendition and contrast

It’s no secret we live in the era of Instagram, VSCO film and in-camera film emulation filters, where most people are perfectly happy with applying a preset or selecting a filter and not doing much in the way of post-processing beyond that.

However, while those creative options are certainly nice to have, a lens like the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 isn’t really aimed at that type of photography. This will be a working tool for most people, and as such, it is important to consider the character and rendering you’ll be getting out of camera with this lens.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 has a more neutral rendering than the lenses Sony designs in collaboration with Zeiss. Where the Sony-Zeiss lenses are more contrasty and punchy with beautifully saturated colors, this lens has a more subtle approach to contrast and color.

Images out of camera usually require a bit of massaging in post processing to really bring out the best in them, but this is actually a great thing: it’s always easier to add character in post than it is to remove it, so this lens will lend itself to a very wide range of applications, and will allow you to achieve very different looks in your final images if you so desire.

Beyond that neutral rendering, the lens is technically immaculate, producing crisp tones and great differentiation between shades. This is definitely a high-end optical instrument, and performs exactly as you would expect.

Vignetting

Vignetting is light falloff that occurs in the corners of an image, particularly at large apertures.

With the Sony FE 70-200mm F4, vignetting is virtually invisible most of the time in actual pictures thanks to the lens profile correction available in Adobe Lightroom.

If you shoot JPEG or RAW without a lens profile, there will be some vignetting wide open throughout the entire zoom range, but particularly so at the 70mm end.

However, at 70mm and f/4, light falloff is very gradual, which results in vignetting being not quite as noticeable as in some other lenses, despite being pronounced. Once you stop down to f/5.6 the lens cleans up nicely, and by f/8 vignetting can be considered gone for all practical purposes.

Vignetting isn’t always an unwanted property though, and in fact many people enjoy the artistic effect it creates in some images. That said, the built-in lens profile in Lightroom can automatically correct vignetting at the click of a single button, making it a non-issue in practical shooting.

Chromatic aberration and fringing

Chromatic aberration (CA) and color fringing refer to the lens’s ability to capture a full range of colors of visible light at the same point. Heavy chromatic aberration typically appears in the form of purple or green fringing around the more contrasty borders of an image.

The lens’s two advanced aspherical elements and the extra aspherical element definitely contribute to controlling aberrations impressively well. All kinds of CA are virtually non-existent, and once you activate the Lightroom profile correction, any remaining traces can be easily removed with a single click.

Spherochromatism is caused when spherical aberrations are not equally corrected for all wavelengths in visible light. It manifests itself in the form of a magenta cast in the region immediately preceding the focal plane (closer to the camera), as well as a greenish cast in the region immediately following the focal plane (farther away from the camera).

Like CA, spherochromatism is a non-issue with this lens. This definitely puts the lens towards the front of the pack when it comes to performance in the FE system.

Ghosting and flare

Lens flare may occur when a bright light source is caught in the angle of view of the lens, in such a way that its light rays hit the front element of the lens directly. Those rays may then bounce off other elements or even the sensor itself, producing several artifacts along their path. Lens flare usually presents itself in the form of severe haze and a pronounced loss of contrast across the entire frame.

Since this isn’t a Sony-Zeiss lens, it doesn’t use the Zeiss T* multi-coating, which ostensibly reduces flaring by a great degree. As a result, flaring is occasionally a problem here, which is perhaps the only complaint one could direct at the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens in the image quality department.

When the Sun is in the frame, contrast is usually preserved across the frame reasonably well. However, if we partially block it, flaring can rear its ugly head in the form of greenish/bluish blobs of light. This can be due to internal reflections in some of the lens’s elements, the lens mount, or even the sensor itself.

In some situations, flaring can be pronounced enough to actually ruin your shot. Keep in mind that these blobs are extremely difficult — and sometimes impossible — to correct in post, so it’s better to be careful when shooting.

Distortion

The Sony FE 70-20mm F4 lens suffers from very slight barrel distortion at the 70mm end, and moderate pincushion distortion at the 200mm end. That is to be expected in a lens like this, due to the wide zoom range it covers. Still, distortion is very well corrected by the Lightroom lens profile, meaning you probably won’t see it at all in real-world shooting.

Now, there’s a difference between lens distortion — usually in the form of barrel or pincushion distortion — and shift, which causes vertical lines to converge towards or away from the center when the camera is not held perfectly level to the ground.

Since this lens is less likely to be used to capture wide architectural shots, shift distortion is usually not a problem you need to worry about.

Finally, due to the telephoto nature of the lens, perspective distortion is also not likely to be an issue. Given that the lens’s minimum focusing distance is 1 meter, you can shoot at the 70mm end without worrying about distorting your subject too much.

Real world usage and image samples

A 70-200mm f/4 lens is, by definition, a specialized lens. You’re not likely to use it on a casual walk around the neighborhood with your camera, but when you do need it, there’s nothing quite like it.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS embodies everything that’s great about these lenses: tough, well-built, with impressive optical performance and no-nonsense aesthetics. It is an instrument and it definitely excels at that role.

Covering a very wide focal range, it is a versatile instrument, at that. At the 70mm end, the field of view is wide enough that environmental portraits are easy to capture, and the lens’s neutral rendering gives you all the control you could ever want over the final results.

Stepping into the 80-135mm range, this is where this lens truly shines. Devoid of the slight imperfections that are inevitable at both ends of the zoom range, it is here where optical performance reaches its highest point. This range is perfect for more tightly framed portraits, and thanks to the constant f/4 aperture, you don’t need to give up bokeh and subject isolation in the process.

Finally, between 135mm and 200mm, sharpness suffers a bit and there’s moderate pincushion distortion to contend with, but the lens still delivers impressive results overall. Landscapes are crisp and vivid, and you can get even more reach if you pair it with an APS-C body.

Although not designed as a low-light shooter, the image stabilization built into the lens means you can keep using it when light fades away, up to a point. Also, the constant aperture and silent focusing make it very well suited for video. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be anything this lens can’t do.

Of course, being an f/4 lens, the amount of background blur you can get is limited, but this is less of a problem in the telephoto range than it is in the standard and wide angle ranges, for obvious reasons. Yes, an f/2.8 lens is definitely better to have in certain occasions, but that’s not to say you can’t get awesome results with this lens.

Room for improvemement

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS is a fantastic lens, but it does have some room for improvement:

• The tripod collar should be easier to store when not in use. The current design is L-shaped, which makes it nearly impossible to carry in your bag in any other way than attached to the lens.

• The lens cap should be replaced by one that actually works as intended, instead of delivering frustration and rage to users on a daily basis.

• Flaring resistance ought to be improved. This is the only area where the lens occasionally turns in a poorer than expected performance. It’s not a deal breaker by any means, but with modern multi-coatings and optical formulas this really should have been a non-issue.

• The lens is missing a dedicated aperture ring with a click-less option. This would have taken it to a whole new level for video recording.

• The OSS mode switch needs to be better labeled to clearly indicate what it does. As it is now, there’s just no way of knowing unless you look it up.

• The focusing ring could use a clutch design similar to the one found on the Olympus PRO MFT lenses and some of their premium primes. Also, hard stops at both ends of the focusing range would be a welcome addition.

• While I personally like the cream color of the lens, it’s clearly a not-so-subtle attempt to mimic the Canon L look. There’s no objective reason for the lens to be light-colored, and I fully acknowledge that many people prefer their lenses to come in black. Black lenses blend in a lot better with the environment and as a result, you’re a lot less likely to attract unwanted attention. Marketing-wise, it may be a nice color but functionality-wise, not so much.

• Price. The lens retails for about $1,500, which is roughly $400 more than the equivalent Canon lens. For that same price, Tamron makes an f/2.8 version that is an incredible performer and an outstanding value. I’m not saying Sony has to cut the price in half, but there’s definitely some wiggle room here.

You may have noticed that only one of these is related to the actual image quality of the lens. That’s because there’s hardly anything to complain about in that department. No matter how you slice it, the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens is one heck of a lens.

Alternatives

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 is an excellent performer and right now, easily the best choice for the vast majority of Sony users.

If you really want to find an alternative, you could go with an adapted, similarly-specced lens for the Canon EF-mount, but the price difference is not large enough to justify the performance penalty, at least in my opinion. Once you factor in the cost of a decent adapter, you’re going to be paying roughly the same price, and none of those adapted lenses will perform better than the native lens. Also, AF performance and accuracy may take a huge hit in certain lighting conditions, making the choice a no-brainer if you ask me.

Now, if budget is absolutely a constraint, and you need a 70-200mm f/4 lens, and you own a Sony FE camera with IBIS — currently the α7 II or α7R II only — I suppose you could go with the Canon EF 70-200mm f/4 L USM lens. This is the cheapest 70-200mm lens Canon makes, and it retails for about $600. Throw in a cheap adapter and you have a similarly specced — albeit nowhere near as nice — package for about $700, which amounts to approximately half the price of the Sony lens.

However, do keep in mind that compared to the Sony, the aforementioned Canon lens lacks image stabilization, so you’d need to rely on the camera’s IBIS, which is likely to perform significantly worse on its own than it would in combination with the OSS found in the native Sony lens. Besides that, the adapter won’t be able to focus the lens as quickly or accurately, and there may be some ghosting issues in your images due to internal reflections. The Canon is also a much older lens, so its optical performance will probably not be as good as the Sony, although it will be good enough for most uses.

This is an extreme case, of course, and I don’t recommend you do it, unless absolutely necessary. If you can stretch your budget at all, get the Sony lens, even if it means buying it used. You’ll thank me later.

Going beyond f/4, Sony just recently announced the long-awaited f/2.8 version of this lens in February 2016. The upcoming lens is almost twice as heavy and will be priced significantly higher, probably even north of $3,000, which is twice the cost of the f/4 version. Unfortunately this places the lens in a whole different class, squarely within pro-only territory. It will be released in May 2016 according to Sony.

Image quality-wise, I’m not expecting the gap between the two to be very significant despite Sony’s enthusiastic marketing materials, which just goes to show what an amazing performer the f/4 lens really is. So we’re left with speed, price, size, and weight as the deciding factors.

If you absolutely need an f/2.8 lens, then there isn’t much of a choice to make, really. But if you can make f/4 work for you, there’s plenty to love about the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 lens, and it is just a much, much better value for your money.

Finally, there are 70-200mm f/2.8 lenses for other systems that can be used with the α7 II and α7R II while still retaining decent AF performance, but those have been shown to have spotty reliability at best when zoomed past 135mm or so. For some reason, the current crop of adapters really struggle to perform well into the far end of the telephoto range, so I can’t really recommend any of those lenses as suitable alternatives.

Long story short: for this focal range, nothing beats a native FE lens. If you need the f/2.8 aperture, wait until May and go with the bigger lens. If you can live with f/4, go with this one. Easy.

Final words

70-200mm lenses make so much sense, because they cover a wide range of areas that are indispensable for the working photographer, and they usually do it in a solid, reliable package with excellent performance.

Those qualities are extremely valued in the field, because they allow you to go on with your workflow and maintain creative and technical control over your output in most scenarios. Primes are great optical jewels that produce stunning results, but when it comes to reliability and versatility, nothing beats a great telephoto zoom. It’s no wonder, then, that you can find one of these in almost every photographer’s bag.

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS is a fantastic example of everything that’s great about this popular lens format. It’s solid, compact, and packs an impressive punch in the image quality department. And while it is a bit more expensive than similar lenses for other systems, it’s still reasonably priced considering everything it offers.

At the end of the day, this is a lens that begs to be used, and the results it produces are up there with anything else available for any other camera system. If you need a great telephoto lens for your Sony E-mount camera, there’s no need to look any further than the Sony FE 70-200mm F4.