Sony E 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS Lens Review

Sony 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS Handling and Features

Surprisingly for a budget E-Mount lens, the outer barrel is made from aluminium alloy with an inner barrel made from high quality black plastics and a metal lens mount. Even with the lens only weighing 194g, the lens feels robust. The low weight and compact size makes sure the lens will match up perfectly with even the most compact NEX series camera bodies, and it handles very well on the Sony NEX-7 used for testing.

Auto focus is quick and accurate and applying manual focus adjustments is a pleasure, thanks to the smooth action of the focusing ring, which is nicely damped. Minimum focus is 25cm from the sensor plane, which is quite close for a lens of this type.



As focusing is performed internally, the 49mm filter ring does not rotate, which makes the lens ideal for use with graduated and polarising filters. A petal-shaped lens hood is supplied as standard, which attaches to the lens via a bayonet fitting.

For those times when slow shutter speeds are necessary, this lens comes equipped with optical image stabilisation. With care, allowing a pause for the stabilisation to catch up, sharp hand-held images can be taken at shutter speeds as slow as 1/10sec, which is roughly three stops slower than the usual rule of thumb for hand-held photography would allow.

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