Sony FE 50mm f/1.2 GM
Sony joins the f/1.2 club in style
Our verdict on this new nifty fifty – the brand’s fastest-ever G-Master optic
When it comes to 50mm standard primes for full-frame cameras, the most common choices are a budgetfriendly f/1.8 lens or a more upmarket f/1.4 option. With the FE 50mm f/1.2 G Master, Sony joins an exclusive 50mm f/1.2 lens club with only two previous members: Canon and Nikon. The Sony lens undercuts both its competitors on price and, despite needing large front elements to let in lots of light, it’s noticeably lighter than the Nikkor Z 50mm f/1.2 and barely more than two thirds the length.
The standout feature of any f/1.2 lens is its fast aperture rating, enabling a super-skinny depth of field and fast shutter speeds under very low lighting conditions, helping to freeze motion and enable handheld shooting without bumping up your ISO rating. But there’s much more to this lens than just ‘fast glass’.
The optical path includes three XA (extreme aspherical) elements, engineered to a surface precision tolerance of just 0.01 microns. The aim is for excellent sharpness across the entire frame with minimal spherical aberration and enhanced bokeh. An 11-blade diaphragm helps to maintain a particularly well-rounded aperture when stopping down a little, again enhancing the bokeh – the competing Canon lens has 10 blades and the Nikon has nine.
Performance
Ultra-fast lenses are somewhat notorious for lacking sharpness when you shoot wide-open, especially towards the edges and corners of the frame. The 50mm f/1.2 is massively impressive at maintaining scintillating sharpness at f/1.2, easily beating the competing Canon and Nikon lenses in our tests. Stop down to just f/2 and corner-to-corner sharpness becomes absolutely stellar.
There’s more good news when it comes to both lateral and axial chromatic aberrations, which are entirely negligible. The quality of bokeh is absolutely outstanding, with a beautifully buttery smoothness. Matthew Richards