Sony SEL1855 Pro Reviews

The Sony E 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS may perform decently on lower resolution NEX cameras (the 3 and 5 series). However, its capabilities are clearly overstrained on Sony's 24 megapixel sensor. In so far it is very surprising that Sony is also offering it bundled with the NEX 7. The quality is rather miserable at 18mm and if you want to achieve reasonably sharp results across the image field you should generally avoid large aperture settings at the other focal lengths as well. Another weakness is the high amount of lateral CAs at 18mm and 35mm. This decreases the subjective quality perception quite a bit if you don't care about it during post-processing or by activating the CA auto-compensation in the camera. The distortion characteristic is about average for a lens in this class - heavy barrel distortion at 18mm and slight to moderate pincushion distortion towards the long end of the range. If you disable the vignetting compensation you will have to live with a rather heavy light falloff between 18-35mm at large apertures.

As the kit lens for the NEX series, we don't expect it to be perfect, but the lens has a few objectionable results in our testing of it. The lens could certainly stand to be a bit sharper, and there are some odd results in our CA testing. Corner shading is good, and distortion is about what you would expect, so in the end, it's probably what you would expect for the price, but nothing to write home about. Unfortunately, from a practical point of view, the camera / lens combination is a bit too bulky to be the ''pocket camera'' many might have been expecting, but if you're fine with the idea of carrying the camera in one pocket and the lens in the other, it does make a very portable combination.