Another new lens!

Whilst investigating the Sony Macro lens, I was also distracted by another lens, the Sony 16mm Pancake lens. This is a prime lens, which means it has no zoom facility, it also is considerably smaller (length-ways) than any of my other lenses which compliments the compact size of the NEX-3 making it virtually the size of a compact camera!

Sony SEL-16F28 (taken from www.sony.co.uk)

Now brand new this lens is £200 so when I first saw it I dismissed it, not really seeing much point in it - but as time went on I started to see the appeal, not just of this prime lens but also the extra attachments which Sony have created - namely the fisheye and the ultra wide angle lens attachments!

Really, fisheye lenses are a bit of a toy, a bit of fun, though you can get some really creative results with them and they are of course great for recording movies as well (just look at some skateboarding movies to get the idea). I've always wanted one, always liked the look of them, but until now it's never really been an option.

The more I investigated though the more I saw the appeal of the ultra wide angle attachment for capturing great pictures in small spaces where you have no room for manouver or where you wish to cram in as much as possible such as outdoor landscape shots etc.

In turn, I realised the 16mm prime lens on it's own would give some degree of these benefits - I also realised that using this much shorter lens would be ideal to use it for a couple of things: Travel, and Sport.

Travel - because I take my camera everywhere, but sometimes it is just a bit too big & bulky to be carrying around with me at all times, a smaller camera would be easier.

Sport - lets not get confused with the sports action pictures taken with absolutely huge lenses, I'm referring instead to the ability to carry my camera with me whilst taking part in sports such as mountain biking and snowboarding. In both of these hobbies I see some pretty breathtaking amazing sights but am never really able to take pictures along the way. I would never dream of taking my NEX-3 with me for risk of damaging it or the lenses, but with the 16mm lens on it becomes so much smaller and compact it could potentially slip in my backpack no problem!

However along with the official cost of the 16mm lens being nearly £200, the pancake and ultra wide lens attachments are a hefty extra price so again I was put off. 

In the end though, I saw the pancake lenses selling second hand on Ebay for around about £100 and found that the fisheye and wide angle attachments were available new through Amazon for a mere £80 each - and I did have that Sony £30 cash back to spend on something... :)

I decided to go for it and snapped up a pancake lens from Ebay which arrived shortly after my holiday (all the way from Thailand).

My first thoughts after opening (& getting over the inevitable "will it work" concern of buying second hand) were just how small and light it is. Compared to the SEL-1855 lens at it's shortest this lens is less than half the length and certainly makes my camera more portable which as I expected will make it handy for travel.

Size comparison of SEL-1855 vs. SEL-16F28

After marvelling over the diminutive size of it, I then pondered the size of the front lens glass. My 18-55 telephoto lens has a large glass lens on the front of it, filling most of the 49mm diameter of the lens. The 16mm lens however has a tiny lens on it, very similar to the SEL-30M35 macro lense. The reason for this if you think about it is quite obvious, if you were looking down a tube through one eye (like a pretend pirate) you would see a lot more through a tube with a 50mm diameter end than you would through a 15mm diameter tube. The eye-hole diameter wouldn't matter so much because your eyeball is not 50mm diameter so can happily look through a smaller diameter eye-hole. 

I took a couple of pictures and was not overly surprised to see that the wasn't a huge amount of difference between the 16mm lens and the 18-55mm lens at 18mm. The 16mm lens did capture a slightly wider picture but that was about it - as expected really.

SEL-1855 (at 18mm) on left, SEL-16F28 on right

There is another benefit to this lens however, it has an F-stop rating of just 2.8 (compared to the 3.5 of my main kit lens) which means that it will be a more suitable lens for lower light situations and should produce sharper images as a result. I will test this over the coming weeks I'm sure!