Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS II Review

Introduction

Ease of Use

Ease of Use

Weighing in at 794g, the aluminium alloy bodied Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS II is 46g lighter than its predecessor.

More significantly it’s around 15% shorter too, achieved by adopting a variable length structure. This means that the lens barrel extends by 3.5cms as you zoom out from 70mm to 200mm, but the lens is easier to carry and fit inside a camera bag when it’s set to 70mm.

Consequently, in use it feels much better matched to a small body like the Sony A7R V camera that we tested it with, as shown in the photos below. While fitting a vertical battery grip would still help with the overall balance, it isn’t as necessary as with the Mark I lens.

While you can use it on a smaller APS-C body like the Sony A6000 series of cameras, it won’t balance particularly well and the equivalent focal length will also change to 105-300mm.

Build quality is once again excellent, something of a relief given the price-tag. The Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS has a sealed dust and moisture resistant design which makes it well-suited to life in both the field and the studio.

As you’d expect the Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS has a metal lens mount and it accepts 72mm filters via metal threads.

There are now three separate round Focus Hold buttons, equally spaced 90° apart, which keep the lens locked to the current focusing distance, useful if you’re auto-focusing and don’t want the lens to try and find focus again. The preview function can also be assigned to these buttons through the camera’s custom settings.

The Focus Range Limiter switch prevents the lens from hunting through the entire focusing range. There are three options – Full, Infinity to 0.3m or Macro.

The Mode switch toggles between Normal shooting (Mode 1), Panning (Mode 2), which automatically adjusts the lens to account for horizontal movement whilst shooting, and the new Mode 3 emphasizes framing stability when shooting dynamic, unpredictable motion.

The Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS has a generously wide and ridged focus ring. Manual focusing is possible by using the AF/MF switch and there’s also now a dedicated switch for Sony’s Full Time DMF (Direct Manual Focus), which allows you to engage manual focus even when the lens is set to AF mode.

There are no hard stops at either end of the range, though, making it more difficult to set focus at infinity. Polariser users should be pleased that the 72mm filter thread doesn’t rotate on focus.

The lens utilizes no fewer than four XD (extreme dynamic) linear motors to produce very quiet, responsive and smooth focusing, making it well-suited to shooting video, helped by suppressed breathing performance throughout the zoom range both optically and via the breathing compensation function available in some Sony Alpha cameras.

The Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS features optical image stabilisation, which together with the A7R V’s own built-in stabilisation mean that we could successfully hand-hold the camera up to 5 stops slower than with a lens with no OIS.

The Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 G OSS lens is commendably supplied with a soft case, a good quality petal-shaped lens hood and a removable tripod collar.

Note that this lens is fully compatible with Sony’s 1.4x and 2x teleconverters which extend the lens’s focal length to 98-280mm f/5.6 using the 1.4x converter and 140-400mm f/8 using the 2x converter.

Focal Range

At the 70mm focal length the angle of view is 34° degrees.

70mm

At the 200mm focal length the angle of view is 12° degrees.

200mm

Chromatic Aberrations

Chromatic aberrations, typically seen as blue or purple fringes along contrasty edges, were not very apparent in our test shots, only appearing in very high contrast areas.

70mm

200mm

Vignetting

With the lens set to its maximum aperture of f/4, there is some light fall-off in the corners, requiring you to stop down by at least 1 f-stop to help prevent it.

70mm

200mm

Distortion

There’s some barrel distortion evident at 70mm and quite a lot of pin-cushion distortion at 200mm in the RAW files – the Sony A7R V camera automatically and successfully applies corrections to the JPEG files that removes most of it.

70mm / JPEG

70mm / RAW

200mm / JPEG

200mm / RAW

Macro

The Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS II doubles up as a decent macro lens, providing half-macro capability over the entire zoom range.

The close-focus point is an impressive 26cm / 0.85ft from the film/sensor plane at the 70mm focal length (42cm / 1.38ft at 200mm) and it has a maximum magnification ratio of 0.5x at all focal lengths.

Bokeh

Bokeh is a word used for the out-of-focus areas of a photograph, and is usually described in qualitative terms, such as smooth / creamy / harsh etc.

In the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS II lens, Sony have employed an iris diaphragm with nine rounded blades, which has resulted in very appealing bokeh.

We do realise, however, that bokeh evaluation is subjective, so we’ve included several examples below for your perusal.

Sharpness

In order to show you how sharp the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS II lens is, we are providing 100% crops on the following pages.