The Sony FE 28-70mm F/2.0 GM Lens Is Just Too Good: Hand's On Review & Sample Images

The new Sony 28-70mm f/2GM is a bit of a dream lens for many, especially for wedding, event, and portrait photographers and filmmakers who love a shallow depth of field. Most professional-level zoom lenses have a maximum aperture of f/2.8 but with a constant aperture of f/2, this lens can potentially replace multiple prime lenses in the bag of a modern creative, bridging that gap between prime and zoom lenses.

Lightweight For Travel

While Canon also has offered a 28-70mm f/2 lens, one of the most impressive stats from the Sony model is that it comes in under a full pound lighter than the Canon. Personally, anything over 1000g is going to add more strain to my fingers, wrist, and shoulder to be worth carrying for an entire day of work, but at only 918g it only weighs 32g more than Sony’s original 24-70mm f/2.8GM while featuring a full stop brighter aperture.

Insanely Fast & Nimble

Like many, I really enjoy the subject separation that I get from fast aperture lenses and after testing, I’m happy to say that the f/2 really does give subjects the pop that I was looking for, something f/2.8 standard zooms never did for me. With a constant aperture of f/2, it also gives your camera a full stop of extra light to work with and for those who have needed to photograph in low light situations, you know that the difference in editing an ISO 800 file vs an ISO 1600 file can be fairly significant, especially when approaching the upper limits of a sensor like ISO 6400 instead of ISO 12,800.

Like any other G-Master lens from Sony, this lens is both optically amazing but also wildly fast to autofocus. The out of focus elements are very pleasing, the images are incredibly sharp across the frame (even wide open at f/2), and things like chromatic aberrations are very well controlled. Focus-breathing is so minimal that I turned off the compensation within the menu because I didn’t feel like it even needed it. With cameras like the new A1II and the A9III, those cameras can do focus and exposure computations 120 times per second and this lens can keep up with that focusing speed, even while taking 120 raw photos per second on a camera like the A9III or 120fps in video on cameras like the FX3, A1II, or A9III (I tested it on all three of them and was shocked at how well focus locked on even at f/2).

Gimbal-Free?

One of the criticisms that some will make (especially from filmmakers) is that this lens is missing 24mm on the wide end as the lens begins at 28mm instead. I also appreciate a 24mm especially on a wide 16:9 aspect ratio, my main issue when filming handheld is eliminating shake and “micro-jitters” (something that wider focal lengths can help to minimize). While I understand this as well, Sony does dial up their algorithms with stabilization when Sony lenses are paired with Sony cameras and I’ve found less stabilization issues on a native 28mm lens on Sony cameras than a 24mm lens from a third party. This can obviously be solved with something like gimbal, and I wish that Sony cameras worked equally with all lenses in stabilization, but it’s just a reality of how those cameras and lenses work together.