Sony 16-50 PZ v's Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 on NEX-7 - samples!

Hi all,

I am a long time Canon user but recently added a NEX-7 to my collection as a digital back for my Canon glass and also as a nice compact holiday camera. I've been looking for a compact lens for my NEX-7, so I finally took the plunge on the Sony 16-50 PZ kit lens which I got from ebay for £187. Given that a lot of people are unsure about this lens and unsure about purchasing one given the lack of reviews, I decided to get one and do a direct comparison with my Canon 17-55mm f/2.8. For those of you unfamiliar with that Canon lens, it's probably one of the best fast APS-C zooms you can buy - sharp from f/2.8 and very sharp stopped down. The RRP for the Canon is ~£750, nearly a whopping four times the price of the Sony kit pancake.

First off, there was no good light to get out for real world examples today - so I apologise for the basic "brick wall" test but that's as good as I can get until the weekend where I should be able to obtain proper images.

Some notes on the below:

- all images processed from RAW in CameraRaw with sharpness set to 50

- no noise reduction

- lens correction profiles applied and CA removal used

- images loaded into CS 6, auto color applied, saves as JPEG quality 10

- the 50mm on the Canon is actually 48mm (no 50mm marking on the lens)

Here are the samples:



Here are my thoughts on the above:

- the 16-50 PZ demonstrates a lot of barrel distortion at 16mm and 21mm with significant vignetting at 16mm. The lens correction profiles in camera and in CameraRaw completely removes this.

- the 16-50 seems to be sharper than the Canon in the centre of the frame in the 16mm and 21mm tests - this comes as a shock!

- the Canon lens is much sharper at the frame edge at wider focal lengths, and roughly as sharp at the telephoto end

- the 16-50 PZ exhibits almost no chromatic aberration in my tests from my living room window (more real world samples will demonstrate this)

- I'm very, very happy with the 16-50 PZ given the size and weight of the lens, I can finally take my NEX-7 skiing and get perfectly acceptable A4 prints, probably even A3!

Here are the actual images resized from 6000 pixels to 1800 pixels:

PLEASE NOTE - the wall is illuminate from a light on the ceiling behind my left shoulder, hence the darker corner on the right hand side. This is not vignetting, but just poor lighting in the stair well :).