voronspb
Senior Member
The camera with 24-240 mm lens tightly fits into a small bag originally purchased for EOS 400D with Sigma 30/1.4 EX DC HSM lens.
I am a bicycle tourist, and since 2012 in my foreign trips I’ve routinely used the Canon EF24-105/4 L lens on FF bodies (before that I used Canon EF 24-70/2.8 L on cropped body). I was pretty much happy with it, but its telephoto reach was limiting at times, especially for photographing birds and other animals which I meet during the trips. In 2014 I purchased the Tamron 70-300/4-5.6 Di VC USD, which solved the problem with lack of reach in my 2014 Iceland trip and allowed to make some great photos.
But in fact I hated the idea of continuous swapping the lenses while cycling, and also these extra 700 grams were sensible on my back during 2 weeks of travelling. So actually the Tamron zoom was used by me on extremely rare occasions.
I finally decided to change my photo system from Canon to Sony not after introducing the Sony A7III, but when I realized that with this camera I can get the native superzoom glass with reasonable quality, covering most of my needs in cycling tours. So after getting the Sony A7III kit (see my brief review), 2 weeks ago I purchased the Sony FE 24-240 mm F/3.5-6.3 lens, mostly for using outdoors with good lighting, so its slow speed wasn’t much an issue to me.
TL;DR
Pros:
- Made for lightweight (well, sort of...) travelers, saving lots of space/weight.
- Lets you make some precious photos, which would be not made at all with other lens.
- Silent, quite fast and capable AF.
- Good build for consumer lens.
- Nice magnification value.
- Some sort of environment sealing.
- Reasonable image quality for ultrazoom lens, especially in center.
- Reasonable weight and dimensions for a full-frame zoom lens.
- Not well suitable for shooting in low light.
- Poor AF performance in highly dynamic scenes.
- Ultrazoom makes massive sample variation and unpredictable image quality of each particular lens sample.
- Image quality is predictably worse than of more specialized lenses.
- The price is high, as usual for Sony lenses.
The lens comes in small and simple carton box, packed only in a sheet of bubble wrap (no polystyrene bed, or carton holders in the box). You get both caps and simple plastic hood. My lens was produced in December, 2017.
Since 2009 I’ve become used to large weight and dimensions of DSLR camera with standard zoom lens, so the Sony 24-240 mm lens size actually looked quite usual to my taste. The Sony camera with this lens may be put with some efforts into a reasonably small shoulder bag, which was originally purchased for using with smallish prime lenses and could not accommodate any of my past DSLRs with standard zooms. The combined weight of camera and lens is also equal to my previous equipment.
So I don’t call the Sony 24-240 mm lens huge and heavy (which it actually is), unlike many other reviewers. Also note that the adapted DSLR lenses (including many primes, especially modern & fast ones) often become even longer than Sony 24-240 mm due to infamuous 26-mm stack between lens and body. See the size comparison between my old and new cameras: https://camerasize.com/compact/#777.755,380.21,ha,t
This lens has quite good magnification of 0.27x
This lens feels like a modern good quality consumer instrument. It’s mostly made of good but plain plastic, with metal mount, rubberized zoom ring and plastic focus ring. Everything is assembled tightly, the double-extending barrel (aka duocam) doesn’t wobble at all. The focus and zoom rings have very smooth and silent operation. This is a major improvement in terms of build quality in comparison to some of my old lenses: Canon EF 28-135 IS USM had extremely wobbling barrel, and Tamron 70-300 Di VC USD had a zoom ring with rough travel, so it didn’t allow smooth zooming while filming the video.
Unlike many other reviewers, I cannot call the zoom ring “stiff”. It rotates with some effort, slowly, but I’d rather call it “tight and smooth”. I suspect that this tightness is caused by some sort of sealing between the dual moving barrels (there’s some faint whisper sound while zooming). If I haven’t read the complaints throughout the Web about the stiff zoom ring, I wouldn’t have noticed any special at all.
It’s reported that this lens has a weather sealing of some sort, but none is seen on the outside. Probably it’s well sealed for consumer lens, but not so well by standards of L-, G-, or Z-series. After some use it started developing rustling noises when rotating the focus ring, which also was an issue with my old 24-105L and 24-70L lenses.
Autofocus
Unlike old lenses with slow AF, capturing the insects in-flight is quite possible here.
This lens is equipped with noiseless and quite fast autofocus (there's some faint noise due to aperture actuation while shooting at closed diaphragm). Note that your mileage may vary on other Sony bodies. As usual in present days, nothing moves on the outside while focusing. On wide end the focus goes from end to end almost instantly. On telephoto end the full travel takes a bit more, about 0.5 to 1 second, and also in poor lighting the hunting will occur.
In real world scenarios the AF feels instant outdoors, as usually it shifts only by a small fraction of full travel. After some efforts I learned how to photograph the dragonflies hovering in flight. The major issue was that the AF system couldn’t recognize the insect against busy background (pond surface) quickly enough, and every time I saw a hovering dragonfly, I had only 1-2 seconds to aim the camera, focus and shoot.
Despite the good speed, I cannot call the AF “snappy”, as on telephoto end it doesn’t catch up with rapidly approaching objects (like a child running at you). In such cases (probably because of large DOF and poor sensor lighting at F/6.3) you won’t get as perfect focus results as with relatively stable objects. The Eye AF works well in applicable scenes throughout the image field on A7III.
In general, the AF performance is sufficient for a travel lens, and also it vastly exceeds any adapted glass (I tried about 8 different models on my MBV adapter) in this aspect. It’s not the sports-oriented lens, and I don’t judge it as such.
Field quality
There's a sweet spot around 50 mm focal length
I find this lens quite capable in the field (but not in the laboratory). The center is quite sharp, but the borders and corners are somewhat soft (especially the upper right one at wide angle in my case), which is seen at 100% magnification. I fully understand that it’s not the best idea to examine the corners of 10x zoom lens at 24 MP sensor at 100% (as reaching the optimum resolution on ultrazoom in every corner on every focal length is next to impossible). See if this small annoyance with upper right corner could be fixed in service under warranty.
According to my experience, the quality in 24-100 mm range is roughly on par with my old EF24-105/4L mounted on EOS 6D. The center is better on 24-240, but the sharpness uniformity is better on 24-105L. The latter may be not the best lens in the history, but it generates very pleasing photos, and many of them are hanging on my walls for years. The same may be also applied to Sony 24-240 mm. Though I doubt that owners of R-series cameras will be pleased with resolution of 24-240 mm lens.
Shot from the same point as above. The ability to shoot at different angles without a bag of glass is quite pleasing, despite the penalty in resolution.
In 100-240 mm range the quality and contrast somewhat decrease towards the long end, but the photos remain pleasing and usable. Note that on long focal ranges you play against slower AF, natural atmosphere blur, camera shake, shallow DOF, and blur caused by rapid subject movements. So in many cases the blurred photos on telephoto end are not caused by the lens’ optical properties. Generally speaking, I shoot on 240 mm (and sometimes even in 10 MP “crop” mode) without hesitations and without any desire to get closer for better quality. The A4 and probably A3 prints will do well.
The lens speed of F/3.5-6.3 is slow by my standards (generally I prefer shooting at F/2.8 and wider), but for my travelling it’s quite sufficient, as majority of photos are made outdoors during the daytime, so I can easily use F/5.6-8 for them. According to lab measurements, the image resolution doesn’t improve much while closing the aperture, so shooting wide open is OK.
Eye AF works as expected from genuine lens.
Distortions and CAs are usual for a non-pro zoom lens. They are corrected by default, but you won’t be scared after disabling the correction (I prefer correcting the vignetting only when I truly need it). The vignetting characteristic is surprisingly good for a zoom lens on FF sensor.
The optical stabilizer in conjunction with IBIS works quite well until -3 EV at 240 mm, according to my experiments. Though I normally shoot not slower than 1/F to have a margin of safety in unstable positions and so on.
While outdoors, I like shooting the flying vehicles and migrating birds passing over me. With this lens it's extremely easy - simply turn on the camera, set the pre-programmed mode on dial, aim and shoot. No worries about the wrong lens installed, and the ultimate quality is pretty much satisfying. (Especially in comparison to my EF 8-15mm F/4L fisheye, which was the only lens I had when I suddenly found myself in the middle of military exercises with multiple bombers and fighters involved.)
The lighting was poor, but the hull number RA-07314 is recognizable on this Aerospatiale Ecureuil.
To my opinion, the Sony 24-240 mm shall be a pretty nice consumer video lens without prominent flaws. It has a silent AF and smoothly rotating zoom ring. But I’m not a videographer.
Conclusion
A critical scene which exhibits the border softness at wide angle, but in most other cases the corners are not in focus anyway.
This is a good travel lens for mid-resolution FF cameras and their owners which are aware of its natural limitations:
- If you shoot mostly indoors, get the prime(s) or 2.8 zoom instead.
- If you don’t have any problems with taking a bag full of glass into the trip, and swapping them continuously, the 24-240 is definitely not for you.
- If you need excellent resolution and don’t shoot at telephoto, get the Sony FE 24-105/4 G instead (which has much worse vignetting BTW).
- If you own the R-series camera, then probably 24-105G + cropping to taste will be better for you.
![I spotted the beaver almost immediately after taking the previous photo. With any other lens on my camera I wouldn't have made both of them. [heavily cropped]](https://www.dpreview.com/forums/data/attachments/1655/1655728-599e1be67557d854fe718b158eafa21c.jpg?hash=ghcdI-jsgT "I spotted the beaver almost immediately after taking the previous photo. With any other lens on my camera I wouldn't have made both of them. [heavily cropped]")
I spotted the beaver almost immediately after taking the previous photo. With any other lens on my camera I wouldn't have made both of them. [heavily cropped]
Of course, you cannot expect from 10x consumer zoom the quality of modern fast prime or “pro” zoom lens. And it doesn’t work well indoors, unless you have a flash, or don’t mind against the ISO 10K+.
On the other hand, the 24-240mm lens gives you a freedom to swap instantly between completely different scenes, which may be vital in certain situations. Quite often you’ll be getting precious photos during the time while a fellow “pro” with a bag full of F/2.8 zooms or primes would be busy swapping his lenses (or simply looking at you in envy, if he had only one lens). Especially this applies to travel situations, when the weather may be foul, and you may not have time or energy to do the lens swapping.
Speaking of getting the 24-105G plus a compact superzoom as a second camera in place of 24-240 — probably that’s not the best idea. Simply put, even with best superzoom compacts on telephoto end you’ll get around F/12 in terms of light gathering abilities (aperture x crop-factor), which gives 4 times less light than F/6.3. You’ll get either MUCH more noise, or movement blur, or both of these diseases. So the actual performance outside the range of 24-105mm lens would be severely limited…
Bottom line: I’m personally pretty much satisfied with my Sony 24-240 lens, it’s not impressive, but deserves the 4.5 star rating within its application scope.
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Vladimir Gorbunov
