DPReview TV: Sony LA-EA5 A-mount to E-mount adapter review

LA-EA5 Adapter did not ship in October as expected. Does anyone know what the new ship date is?
Martin

DPR TV being thick (or just thick-skinned) ... for a week now ignoring
- the major flaw in this review which is easily found by simply clicking on "Most popular" comments and checking what these comments are about
(hint: Screw drive AF lenses with built-in AF motors....).
- the feedback they received in fora as well
- zero "Editor's pick" comment
- the single "DPR staff" reply totally unrelated to all above.
@ Chris Niccolls: You scored an "F". Redo your review

For the next version they should add drop in filters like Canon does. This makes using and changing filters easier and they usually cost less too.
Also add video support. No AF during video seems like a deliberate use of the cripple hammer.
One more thing they could do is make is so most A mount lenses work with more than a few cameras including Sony's latest models (A9ii, A7Siii A7c,, etc)

A99M (Mirrorless) FE mount... + LA-EA5 + my Sony CZ 135mm f1.8 and 24mm f2... A monster mirrorless is coming...

How horrible of Sony, limiting it to A7r4 is just plain out evil.

Off-topic (but 100% related to the article): Using children (assume that is Your kid) in a commercial video always makes me concerned. What if the child when growing up dislikes the worldwide spread of his/her face by the family in a commercial work. Does she in this case get paid by DPR/Amazon? I would be killed by my daughters even if I would post old pictures of them. For the children's sake stop using them on the internet. Let them decide bu themselves when they are grown up.

Chris,

I am currently using the Sony A7R4 camera with Firmware version 1.20) with the Sony 70-400 mm G SSM II A mount lens plus the LA-EA3 adapter. This combo is giving me modicum results. Since this lens has the built in motor I do not need the LA-EA5 adapter for that. I was wondering if the LA-EA5 adapter would provide better phase detect AF performance than the LA-EA3 adapter.

Domenick Creaco

@Chris you were wrong about both lenses you tested, they are screw driven lenses without AF motor. I have both lenses and love them all.
Too bad you could not correct the video comment but please add captions/text otherwise many folks will be confused ... see all the comment before.
You could have just looked at the lens before putting it on the body, there is a shining "pin" with a screw head ( slot in the center).

You could also test the 50F1.4 which is SSM - SAL50F14Z, then it makes a better review/test to cover both kind of ZA lenses.

Better if you spoke at half the speed. Many viewers arent American and many have English as a second language. Suggest you take some elocution lessons

I still have my Zeiss 135mm F1.8 for A-mount (and a less stellar 35mm F1.4 G), but it's a bummer the adapter only offers AF for screw driven lenses only with the A7RM4 and A6600...

Guess I'm gonna have to buy the Monster Adapter LA-EA4R mod kit.

edit: Still waiting for a good reviewer to test Minolta AF lenses on the LA-EA5... that's where the real appeal of the LA-EA5 will be... otherwise, seems like the a99II will be the eternal solution for using old Minolta/Sony A-mount lenses...

Oh God, i like it so much ZA 135 1.8. I had Canon 135 2, but despite the fact that it is older, it has a more modern out-of-focus nature. ZA has a more classic character to my view. I once had a chance to play with this lens and almost switched to Sony after that. But at that time, their DSLRs were very unreliable - autofocus lived its own life, and the sensor collected dust with crazy speed. It's sad that the screwdriver in this adapter doesn't run Af for video.

The colors look a little warm on this lens, but otherwise I am liking the quality.

There are two things to test with the LA-EA5:

1. Screw-drive lens performance.
2. Usability with 3rd-party lenses (Sony documents Minolta/Sony lens compatibility on their website).

Sadly, this review does neither, and is thus rather pointless....

Because of this adapter announcement, I'm upgrading from A99 to A7R4. My journey from Minolta film days continues. I can't remember now how many times A mount was pronounced dead in past 20 years.

And beyond all the criticism on the "built-in AF motor":
Great portraits of the little lady showing that theses lenses having a home in a system considered "dead" by many have an awesome lot of photographic life in them, even on a demanding 61.2MP BSI-CMOS sensor.

The question everyone wants to know is how bad is it on the other bodies that are not listed.

Does it work at all?
If it works how slow is it?
Does it lock up the camera?

For those who are interested in how fast A Mount SSM lenses focus on the LA-EA5:
Watch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-V9_-PYvCHs#action=share

Major review video flaw which has been pointed at already:
Two screw-drive-AF A Mount lenses critizised for the AF performance of their built in motors. Indeed, the lenses have to fail because .... there is no built-in motor. I own the Minolta 85/1.4 and the CZ 135/1.8, and the CZ is okay in AF speed while the Minolta is a snail. The CZ 85/1.4 is no different in AF speed to its predecessor.
But: From 05:00 runtime on Chris gets the message across: With the caveat that currently full OSPDAF performance with the LA-EA5 is limited to the A7RIV and a6600, what Sony has done here addresses the owners of the over 16 million A Mount lenses sold over the A Mount lens life span. Not all will (have to) migrate as their A Mount bodies may still work for quite a while. But it is a path now available that wasn't available with this AF quality before: The previous LA-EA1/3 and LA-EA 2/4 have their shortcomings compared to the LA-EA5 when used on the two bodies which support full OSPDAF so far.

So why doesn’t the LAEA3 support faster than 2.5 FPS with SSM lenses on A7 bodies??
Why is video AF crippled with this adapter and SSM lenses?

Why doesn’t Sony just make an adapter that makes A mount SSM lenses work virtually natively on all E mount cameras??

Both Canon and Nikon make it look easy. Many of their newer DSLR lenses are said to AF better on their new mirrorless cameras.

Heck even Sigma’s and Metabones make EF adapters that have more functionality than this new Sony adapter. Including AF during video. Why do Canon lenses work better than Sony SSM lenses?

Nikon, AF-D to Z adapter plz.

Kudos to Sony for yet another valuable photographic innovation. Beyond being a nice gesture to their A-Mount users, the LA-EA5 will help Sony drive the rest of their DSLR and mirrorless user base towards upgrading to one of Sony’s newer bodies.

Meanwhile, shame on Nikon for not offering a screwdriver capable adapter for their Z mirrorless system. The number of F-Mount users with AF and AF-D lenses in hand vastly eclipses Sony’s A-Mount user base, yet Nikon is too lazy to take advantage of this sort of adapter to incentivize DSLR users to move over to Z.

Then Nikon corporate wonders why adoption of Z is not meeting expectations and lags far behind Sony, Canon, and Fuji. The answer is simple. You are not building products that for the benefit if your customers. It seems Nikon these days can only copy and iterate product. They have totally lost the ability to innovate.

This thing is exactly what I was waiting for.

Love this thing

I see the Sony guys are attacking DPR and spreading misinformation again. Nothing new.

The LAEA3 already worked with SAM and SSM lenses since they do not need a motor in the adapter.
The LAEA4 and LAEA5 are more for the screw drive lenses without motors.

A mount lenses with motors still are crippled on A7 series cameras. Either they can’t shoot faster than 2.5 FPS with the LAEA4 or video AF is crippled with the LAEA5. And the LAEA5 is only currently works fully on a few bodies.

DPRTV did a good job.
I think the Sony fans are still upset newer F mount and EF mount lenses work better and are not crippled by Nikon and Canon. For example about 60 Nikon F lenses work virtually natively and some say even better on Z mount.

There is another adapter out there "the monster adapter" which takes out the slt mirror and reprograms the adapter. The 500 reflex gets focus all across the screen rather than just the center point as in the la5.
https://www.dyxum.com/dforum/rumor-laea4r-monster-adapter-being-developed_topic138050.html

Those are stunning back lit photographs of the little lady. Could the photographer please tell me how he got the exposure right and / or how he achieved the result.

Just want to complement you on how effective your videos are. I have never owned any photography equipment made by Sony, nor do I have any plans to own any, but still I’m watching this video. I always learn something about my own camera gear in the process.

Your channel is a welcome contrast to so many other photography channels where the presenters try way too hard to be funny, almost always without success, and it keeps them from getting to the point before I get exasperated with their antics. You guys stay on point, and that is great.

Also, the quality of your photos in your sample galleries - from a composition standpoint - are consistently better than your written-word colleagues’. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing yet, but I’d rather look at good-looking shots when evaluating gear, than otherwise.

Your videos improve constantly, and will inspire the work of thousands.

Thanks, Chris and Jordan.

I have zero A-mount lenses, but I have brilliant Nikon AF-D lenses for screw drive motors. It would be great, if an adapter manufacturer (Metabones, Fotodiox, Kipon, Viltrox) would make an AF-D adapter for Sony cameras, as a matter of fact for Nikon Z cameras, too. Hundreds of thousands of excellent(-ly small) affordable AFD lenses are out there that are waiting for their reborn on in-body-image-stabilize full-frame mirrorless camera world with AF. Minolta shooters are lucky since Sony made not less than 5 adapters, two of them having screw drive motors. Nikon simply ignores its own AFD community.

Is the LA-EA5 fully compatible with the a7C?

Untypical technical fail by DPR here.

As a couple of others have said neither the 135/1.8 or the 85/1.4 have internal motors as Chris claims, so what is being tested here is the efficacy of the screw drive motor in the adaptor.

That's all well and good but it would be nice to have seen the performance with a motorised Sam or SSM lens, which do allow AF and tracking in video, unlike the screw drive lenses.

Beyond the stated video about the la5, did anyone notice the rich & accurate colors from the A7sIII?

Unfortunately it doesn't make AF usable for things that move. If you are going to shoot stationary subjects, it will work, but so does manual focusing. :( I was hoping an adapter would allow focusing at speeds close to native mounts, so it's usable for action photography.

Neither the 85mm or the 135mm have internal motors they are screw drive only.

Kudos to Sony for releasing this and more so if they can update the firmware to allow it to screw-drive on more bodies. It's a bit late in coming for me though. Buying this would just delay the purchase of a EF 100-400mm lens. That one lens would meet most of my sports needs and relegate my Minolta glass to more sedentary use.

Using my 135 CZ on E-Mount with Eye-AF sounds like a great deal, and your examples prove that the Lens is more than capable to deliver.

Yet now I am in the dilemma that to use my 13 year old lens with the new adapter I would need to upgrade my 2 year old camera.

Well played Sony ... well played.