CP+ 2016: A look inside the G Master lenses at the Sony booth

Also G is short for Ganster in many rap songs.

@eazizisaid: I'm an American and a fluent English speaker. I also do not understand the problem with the "G-Master" name at all. I think that people on this website are extra critical, and they will criticize nearly anything, no matter if there is a reason to or not.

Some criticisms are that it's like "Master P" (rapper), "Grandmaster Flash" (rapper), "G-spot" (sex-related), "Masturbate" (sex-related), or whatever. I honestly don't understand those criticisms at all, and they seem quite stupid to me (although Arizona Sunset was just explaining some ideas to you, so I'm not saying he is stupid.) Don't worry. I think your English knowledge is fine. You are just too mature for this crowd.

If maturity means that you can't have a bit of fun with language, than color me a child.

Second this. Having owned both the ZA is sharper and sharper across the frame, it also has much nicer Bokeh. But the Sigma does AF better on an A7R II than the older ZA (screw drive, so EA4 only).

Like so much else, Sony has totally shifted the cropped-sensor paradigm.

GM actually stands for Grand Mother ;p

No it isn't... at least not in size... it is a hair shorter than the A-Mount G2 lens, but it is heavier by a bit.

Source: I have shot both lenses and own the G2

While I mainly agree with you you need to consider the center of gravity of the combination of body + lens. A zoom lens is usually held where you have control over the zoom ring. If the center of gravity is further to the front than that you will actually have balance problems even with good technique. A grip can help in those cases though I agree it is not necessary.

For most lenses though, a good handholding technique would be absolutely sufficient.

Meh.

Horses for courses. Personally, I find the addition of a vertical grip to help a lot in steadying a bigger lens. YMMV.

Particularly with the a7 series, it's helpful. Take this from someone who never believed in grips on DSLRs, but now religiously prefers to use one on the a7R II. The problem with the a7 cameras is that their grips are so short that really only my forefinger and middle finger wrap around the grip, and I'm able to squeeze my ring finger in but usually it's falling off the bottom a bit.

With the grip, I can wrap all four fingers around the grip tightly, which literally makes it more comfortable than a DSLR with no grip, while adding much more support for heavy lenses, extra battery life, easier vertical shooting, and with the Neewer grip, wireless remote control. And the body + grip still comes out weighing like 40g less than a D810. I also tend to shoot one handed a lot, so the grip really helps. Even if you don't shoot one handed, you should still feel the benefit- like every time you raise the camera to your eye. It's just much easier with the extra grip of (up to) two extra fingers.

The mount is the brass colored bit there. On the 85mm and the 24-70, there are optical elements in place of where a mirror box would be. On the 24-70, the last optical element is right around the inner flange of the mount, while the 85mm has the last element peeking into the mount area, even.

The 70-200 has more of a gap (though not as much as the A-mount 70-200) because it needs room for teleconverters. These lenses are all shorter than their equivalent SLR lenses with adapters, except for the 85mm, and the extra length is not empty air, but rather optical elements. Please read this post for more info:

http://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/57238942

@Peacekeeper, is "telecentric" the term you were looking for?

T-stop is a reflection of actual lens performance, whereas an f-stop is the result of a mathematical formula that doesn't tell you how much light the lens really transmits.
As for all the glass, it takes a lot of elements to avoid chromatic aberrations, distortion, and to focus. Lenses don't won't to produce rectilinear images, they want to allow different wavelengths to refract at different angles, and then you have to have a moving focus group while still maintaining the lack of distortion and chromatic aberrations. You also have to eliminate internal reflections, flare, and probably a million other things that don't come to mind immediately.

>Joseph

Yes, but I'm viewing this through reading glasses. Just a 'cheap' single polycarbonate lens element, and every thing looks fine?

Photography is not seeing. Your eye is not a digital imaging sensor. Your eye is also not made up of 22 separate lens elements. Your eye has a single, very small image circle. If we had much, much larger photo detectors in our eyeballs, perhaps we would have also either required some bizarre eye mechanisms, or we'd just deal with having to see the world with all sorts of aberrations and distortions. As it stands, our eyes do a lot of their own corrective action through our brains, and we have a very, very narrow angle of view that requires the most advanced bio-chemical computer this world has every seen in order to piece together into a single perceptual model that really only exists in our brain. What I mean is, a picture has to in focus all over in a single plane if possible, whereas our eye can move around, piece together a scene, focus here and there. Photography and seeing are just way different things.

No, I'm saying that your reading glass are designed for your eyes, not for digital imaging. Your eyes sense and process light very differently from a digital sensor. Your glasses aren't making very many changes to the light hitting your eyes. Your glasses aren't responsible for pulling focus, they don't have to produce a perfect rectilinear image circle an inch in diameter at exactly the right plane of focus in order to be useful. There is a small defect in your eye and you have to look through a very specific part of your glasses in order to get the slightly corrected version of the incoming light that allows your eye to perceive the world with greater fidelity. How big is the sweet spot in your glasses? Are they bifocals and you have to look through a tiny lens when you're not looking through the slightly larger lens?
You're just trying to equate two ways of recording images that have very little in common and very, very different requirements.

What aarif said. Given our recent finding that Sigma's new adapter can confer full AF functionality to a Sigma lens attached to an a7R II, including continuous Eye AF, Lock-on AF, and phase-detect AF in video, I'm having a hard time understanding why Sony can't do it with their own lenses on their own adapter on their own camera!

This also means that Sigma's adapter is far better than the Metabones adapter in some way, since it supports all AF functions for Sigma lenses on E-mount (we haven't tried Canon EF lenses on the Sigma adapter yet though).

In fact, I'm understating my excitement at essentially being able to use a Sigma Art lens and have it act like a native FE mount lens on an a7R II, in almost every way. We haven't confirmed this, but it's certainly what it appears like trying out the combination for a few minutes in my hands! Will be curious to see if a 35L II also worked like this attached to a Sigma adapter.

That'd predict we'd be one step closer to a real hybrid camera.

Rishi: Is there any talk that Sigma might make a similar adapter for Nikon mount Sigma Art lenses?

Hope they test the sigma adapter soon. I am nominating it for product of the year.

Rishi, please don't tease us! I hope this is right. How exciting.

Dear Rishi... I think you just announced a groundbreaking news in the comment section

@tkbslc

At least Canon were clear in that they were phasing out FD in favour of EF and they discontinued it. Sony is dragging A-mount customers without giving a clear statement.

@aarif

E-mount cameras can't make Sony flash units to fire the AF assist lamp (in fact, Sony makes it clear E-mount cameras aren't fully compatible with Sony own Flash Units). Also E-mount cameras aren't compatible with Sony own Teleconverters for A-mount lenses (render a-mount lenses incapable of AF, changing aperture or even transmitting EXIF info. And while we're at it, E-mount cameras don't have AF-D Range.

If Sony can't offer everything I mentioned and more features seen on A-mount cameras, they should offer an a99ii with all the advances we have seen on latest E-mount releases but for their A-mount customers. They should also release an a99 with the a7Sii sensor for sports photography with 10fps (instead of the handicapped a7Sii that isn't capable of shooting faster than 5fps which is interesting given the a7rii with whooping 42Mpx also shoots at that rate)

And not everyone is okay with small bodies, small battery, small grip and not-fully compatible cameras. I want tilting-rotating screen and aux. Info lcd too, but the only choices for that within Sony Alpha is the outdated a99 and the APS-C a77ii (which isn't as good as the a7Sii or a7Rii in low light)

Yes, oops, I think I did announce groundbreaking news in the comments, probably violating a hundred journalism tenets in the process. ;)

I'll publish a separate piece on this shortly, hopefully a video showing it in action, if we can get some access tomorrow.

@ Rishi: as to 'why', to use the native AF like this means to use hybrid AF, which is obviously quite cool. However hybrid means that it uses both PDAF and CDAF, it uses the former to get initial focus and CDAF to confirm focus. However if you are using non native lenses they don't tend to play well with CDAF, which slows down the whole process. With adapted A-Mounts they switch to solely PDAF which makes them very fast without the hunting CDAF process. This overall makes the most sense from a user perspective.

You could argue that they could offer both, but to a degree, like having OS in lenses can cause issues with IBIS for people who don't know better it actually ruins photos.

You could turn around and say that 'these users of this gear should know better', which is nice in theory, but actually doesn't work in the real world. It is best to make these things as idiot proof as possible.