Product Reviews

I was long awaiting to buy this lens and boy is it one of the best. It’s sharpest at F2.8-F4.5 and wide open it’s also surprisingly sharp amazing lens

Bought this with my Sony A7iii - great, lightweight lens - good low light performance and great for travel and street photography.

I bought this lens a day ago, overall amazing focus speed, and picture quality!

After frustration from the kit lens in achieving those creamy bokeh portrait images, I figured I needed this lens. Best decision ever. For this reduced price you're getting some quality glass that has sharp focus, super crisp images, is incredible in low light, and gets those creamy bokeh shots for portraits or any other object. You do have to do the "zooming" with your feet however, but I couldn't ask for more. For this price and what this lens has to offer it is a must have in any persons camera bag.

I've owned this lens for 3+ yrs and can tell you it is very sharp,,, I don't know if the others are as sharp or sharper because I don't own them! As far as focus distance, I have focused { manually} at 5-6" so their 1.2' distance in the spec's could be off, so you could use it as a macro lens as far as I'm concerned! I do think it does a better job if you manually focus it but even in auto it does a great job! It does seem to be a little sharper at F4! It's also a very small and light lens as well!

This lens is incredible for the price. Truly a nifty fifty. This was my first prime lens I bought and I didn’t regret it. Lens is a good focal length for portraits and with the f1.8 creates creamy bokeh. It is a good bang for the buck in my opinion.

The apsc 50mm matches the field of fiew of the view finder of both the a6000 and the a7s perfectly. The OSS works well with the a7s. It’s a useful prime to use with a apsc sensor or a cropped 35mm sensor. With a 1.4x crop factor it produces images with an equivilent field of view as a 70mm.

This was my first lense purchase outside the 16-50mm the Sony a6000 comes with. It has taken some amazing pictures for me so far!

Works really well as a prime lens. Great bokeh and quick to focus even in low light.

I am no expert in photography, but this lens is very easy to use and gives some awesome pictures from the first day of use without too much digging about how to use it. I would totally recommend this lens.

Pros: Excellent image quality Great for posed portraits/ stationary subjects Cons: Very slow to focus for a prime, thus unusable for candid/ street photography

I like this lens nice and sharp, price is reasonable, works perfectly with my a6500

i have not had it long but the photos i have taken were sharp and crisp

excellent lens very good build and light weight and takes excellent crisp photos.

Wanted a decent prime lens for a good price. Great image quality. Ideal for portrait work and low light. You cannot go wrong with this lens and a great addition to my a6000

I am very happy with this purchase. This is a definitely daily use lens.

I purchased the 50mm f1.8 as I wanted a fast prime lens that I can use for travel and portrait photography. I am please with the compact size of the Sony lens. The built in optical stabilisation system will aid when shooting in low light conditions. As I have on recently bought this lens I have only used it for some family portraits but was please with the sharpness and clarity of these.

This is a great prime lens for the price and it's fast at 1.8 so you can really make use of existing light and still get a reasonable ISO level. Perfect for portraits at 50mm (75mm equivalent) and really a lot of city scape shots if you can get away with not going wide.

I bought this recently, while it offers great images with bokeh produced by the wide range of f stops, the lens is noisy, (as in sound, not image noise) and uses the camera battery at an alarming rate. Something is working hard in the lense. Even with pre-focus turned off, it is still noisy and a real drain on the battery.

I did try some portraits and it did go well, price is good for what You getting, it is way way better in low light than one came with my a6000, for this price point I Am very happy.

Lovely bright lens great to work with in low light.

Bought this E50mm F1.8 oss fore my A7 so far had excellent results would highly recommend this lens if you are into prime's being an E-Mount fits the A7 perfectly.

For me this is an essential les for all owners of an e mount compatible camera. Stunning clarity and stabilisation. You will also get amazing depth of field and the lens delivers silent focusing at all times. the best 50mm in terms of pricing and features. Very lovely in its construction and design, feels very sturdy and will last forever. The included lens hood is also a nice bonus.

Good build Quality, Great picture Quality lens far superior than the kit lens, more expense than the canon or Nikon equivalent

Love it, by far my favourite lens. I am not a pro in anyway I own the Alpha 5000 (love this camera as well, so easy to use) I own the 16-50 Kit lens, and the 55-210 Zoom (as well as the 75-300 A mount lens with adapter), along with this fantastic Prime lens. As much as I enjoy taking photos with the 16-50, this has become my default lens for non zoom projects. I just love the separation easily achieved, I uploaded a quick shot to demonstrate that.

Bought this lens 2 months ago and have used it regularly, mostly indoors, it being in the winter period. Fitted to the Sony a6000 that it complements perfectly it has demonstrated excellent autofocus and outstanding optical performance.

I bought this lens only two weeks ago and so far have only taken few test shots, but the results are very encouraging.

I've tried this lens out before and liked it so much I bought it straight away (black version). It's lightweight, very sharp and the image quality is great. I've compared images taken on my A6000 and this lens next to images from a full frame camera with equivalent lens and I cannot tell the difference in image quality. Very impressed indeed.

I bought the Prime lens E 50mm F1.8 OSS a month ago and it's my new toy! I am far from being a professional photographer but with this lens, hardly anything to do to have a perfect portrait. Love it! I think a prime lens gives this little touch that Zoom lens can't have... Even though, I believe my close friends may be a bit fed up of having an objective always so close to their face :D

I am an experienced enthusiast. I have progressed from film slrs thru' both Nikon and Canon sales. I recently changed to a Sony A6000 and bought the 50mm lens. It is a fantastic lens and is sooooo sharp. I tried a Sony A7r with a Zeiss 55mm f1.8 and really struggled even with major pixel peeking to see any difference. The lens is that good I carry it around all the time and it has never let me down. OSS is a great help in very low light I would not hesitate to recommend this lens

I got the a6000 kit with 16-50 and 55-210 lenses. Naturally my next purchase would be a prime. This 50mm doesn't disappoint. It's very sharp, I love how much detail it picks up. The fast 1.8 aperture makes lower light photos easier, and the OSS even more so! It can throw the background out of focus with ease. It even seems very sharp wide open, and only takes a small drop in aperture to be excellent. Very little distortion, and any other issues are easily fixed in Lightroom to give very nice looking photos. Being 50mm on a crop sensor does mean it's a bit telephoto, so not great for indoors, so I think my next lens is the 35mm 1.8. It looks smart in black, feels solid, but not heavy. The hood is a bit plain, I like the look of petal hoods. The large front glass makes it look good! The only thing I've found a bit of a negative is that manual focussing is very slow. Much slower than the other lenses I have. Hopefully that an be changed in a firmware update. Overall it's a great lens for the money! I'd recommend it as the first prime for an e mount camera.

This lens is a wonderful purchase for a NEX line camera. I used this briefly on my NEX-3N and the results were excellent. The bokeh is smooth and buttery, and the depth of field at the 1.8 and 2.0 are perfect for portrait work with a beautiful blurred backdrop. Autofocus on this lens was a tad slower than the kit lens, and it seems to cycle in and out of focus at times, but other times it was quick as lightning to focus. This likely was due to light conditions. The main caveat to this lens, and it was a large one for me, is the manual focus ring. The ring itself is beautifully crafted of solid metal with a nice grip on it. The throw is a bit weighted and has a substantial feel to it. The issue is that going from near to far focus with this requires what feels like two or three full revolutions of the focus wheel. I bought this lens for manual focus work not realizing how much turning the focus-by-wire approach would involve. I ended up returning the lens because it was causing me wrist pain to flick it as much and as hard as I needed for focus. However, if you aren't like me and going to be doing a ton of manual focusing, it works wonderfully, has excellent build quality, and is a great choice for portrait work. If the full-frame NEX camera comes out soonish, this would make a great standard 50mm, if that model follows convention and has no crop factor.

The combination of features produce a one-of-a-kind experience, that a few years back would have not been affordable. Compact, efficient and powerful. The 50mm tells it with punched contrast and confident timing. Works perfectly with the NEX, where it was designed to come to life. You have the technical stuff here, so I'll just end with this, the image stabilization is worth the cost of the glass alone. 1.8 plus stabilization lets you do amazing work and reduces all kinds of effort. It's a great buy.

i wish it could double as a macro lens.

This is a great lens that I have used to take over 5,000 images of food, flowers, people, and much more. The low aperature does a great job at minimizing the focus depth of field, but you need to make sure to keep it far enough away from things to get it to focus (flowers & smaller things). Overall, this is a great lens for the cost.

After buying the NEX-5N I was told by many photographer friends to get a fast fixed lens. I was happy to find out that this lens was well-reviewed and a great value so I decided to buy it. No regrets! I have had this for some months and after getting used to it I am able to take some amazing shots with great clarity. The bokeh is also of very high quality and is the most enjoyable aspect for me. The fast fstop allows great portraits as well. The construction is solid and the focus ring is smooth. A definite must have for any photographer.

I read reviews explaining this was a great lens, but I was now prepared for how great. I've had it for 4 months, and it is a dream to work with. The images look great even wide open, and I love the bokeh effect. The focus ring is very smooth which makes it extremely easy to get your tiny depth of field right where you want it manually. If you use the NEX camera you simply have to buy this lens (why else would you buy it?). The only drawback is the lack of any indicator as to where your depth of field is on the lens. That would have been nice, but as stated it's not hard be accurate with just your eye or the peaking function. At $300 this is almost a steal.

This is an outstanding lens for the money, and would be a bargain even at a much higher price. I like shooting portraits, A LOT. For serious shoots I use an A77 camera with a 25-year-old Minolta 85mm F1.4 portrait lens, but for casual shoots (when traveling) the 50mm F1.8 OSS on my NEX5n is very hard to beat. It is not as long as I prefer for head shoots (FF equivalent of 75mm instead of my preferred 135mm), it is perfect for head and shoulder portraits or people at work portraits. What really surprised me is the quality of bokeh and just how sharp the lens is. Bokeh is creamilicious, almost of the same quality as my Minolta 85 (a legendary lens for beautiful bokeh). Sharpness is even better than the Zeiss 24mm from F4 and color is almost as rich, but wide open its a bit soft at the edges. Of course, since I use this as a portrait lens, I'm usually shooting wide open and blurring whatever is on the edges anyway. Outdoors in daylight I use a 3 stop neutral density filter to keep this wide-open, and usually keep the NEX5n down under ISO 800. Indoors, I've shot this lens by firelight and with the OSS still get sharp handheld shots (down to 1/15th second at ISO 800). This is a specialty lens, unlike the old nifty fifties form the film days. As a short telephoto, this is really only used for photographing people or objects, rather than places. Still, I bring it with me more often than I leave it at home. Combined with the also outstanding (though far more expensive) Zeiss 24mm, this lens is part of an extremely versatile travel outfit.

A lens required in the camera bag to complement the NEX-7. Sharpness is quite good in the center and the borders from f/3.5 and up are decent. With the NEX-7, the lens brings out an impressive amount of detail from f/4 to f/6.3. The bokeh is superb. CA is minimal even on the 24 megapixel sensor of the NEX-7. It would be nice to have 1.4 lens at this price, but in the end the compact size of the this lens makes the 1.8 a nice compromise. Now if Sony would add a 35mm f/1.8 lens to the e-mount lens lineup.