Let’s squeeze some pretty irrel­ev­ant news in here for a second: There’s a new kid on the block, or rather a new lens in my col­lec­tion :-)

The lawn mower is of no par­tic­u­lar import­ance, except it was one of the very first shots I took with the new lens.

It’s a bril­liant new tele­photo lens with a focal length range from 70 to 300 mm, at aper­tures of ƒ/4.5 – 5.6, so it’s a fairly com­pact. It’ll replace my lovely old beer­can (a clas­sic 70-​210mm ƒ/​4 Min­olta lens) which was nice in that it is an extremely com­pact lens for its focal length and con­stant aper­ture, but it suffered ter­rible lon­git­ud­inal chro­matic aber­ra­tions and was rather soft wide open, mean­ing I had to stop it down to at least ƒ/5.6 any­way.

The new lens in turn shows vir­tu­ally no chro­matic aber­ra­tions what­so­ever, and is fully usable wide open. Also, it has an ultra­sonic focus­sing mech­an­ism which makes its focus fast, accur­ate and per­fectly quiet. Also, the lens is not much lar­ger nor heav­ier than the beer­can, but has a lar­ger focal length range. I think that’s a fair trade :-)

PS: Here‘s a com­par­ison shot of the lenses, show­ing the dif­fer­ence in image qual­ity. At ƒ/5.6, the Sony was wide open, whereas the beer­can was stopped down one stop.