Lens sony sel 55-210mm review năm 2024

Introduced in 2011, Sony’s E 55-210mm f4.5-6.3 OSS falls into the firm’s entry-level line-up, and was the first telephoto zoom launched for the NEX, now Alpha, APS-C mirrorless models. As the equivalent to an 85-320mm, this sensitively priced model is an obvious counterpart to the firm’s 18-55mm starter lens. Despite being aimed at beginners, it features two extra low dispersion glass elements and one aspherical lens in its construction. The latter is used in the focusing group to improve AF accuracy from the camera’s contrast detection AF system.

Sony’s OSS four-stop stabilization system is included to reduce camera shake – a useful addition in a long lens with only a moderate maximum aperture. This model can also boast internal focusing and a linear driven ‘stepper’ type AF motor for smooth, near silent focus operation. With a 49mm filter thread, the lens measures 2.51 x 4.25″ (63.8 x 108 mm) and weighs in at 12.17 oz (345 g). It’s available for around $350.

Image quality ranking: Sony E 55-210mm F4.5-6.3 OSS mounted on Sony NEX-7

The Sony E 55-210mm f4.5-6.3 OSS achieved a DxOMark score of 12 points overall and is about average for a lens with this range of focal lengths. Peak sharpness of 7-Mpix, however, is on the low side given the resolving power of the 24-Mpix sensor of the Sony NEX-7. Like many affordable zooms, this one performs better at the shorter-end of the zoom range and like most lenses, it requires stopping down at least a stop to improve sharpness in the outer field.

At 210mm, it’s soft wide open where it counts and although sharpness improves a little at f/8, it’s still only moderately sharp in the center. Some mild pincushion distortion can be seen throughout the zoom range, and despite the modest aperture there’s quite noticeable vignetting, peaking at 1.5Ev wide open at 55mm, though it pretty much disappears by f/8. Lateral chromatic aberration is well controlled, though some may be noticeable in the corners at 55mm.

Sharpness is on the low side, wide-open at 210mm

Sony E 55-210mm F4.5-6.3 OSS mounted on Sony NEX-7 Versus Sony DT 55-200mm F4-5.6 SAM mounted on Sony SLT Alpha 77 Versus Canon EF-S 55-250mm f/4-5.6 IS II mounted on Canon EOS 7D:

When matched to similar offerings the Sony achieves a comparable ranking for overall image quality. Against the longer-range Canon EF-S 55-250mm f4-5.6 IS II on the 18-Mpix Canon EOS 7D it may have only slightly higher peak sharpness, but it’s sharper at every setting (though keep in mind the difference in sensor has a bearing here). However, the Canon has lower levels of chromatic aberration, particularly at 55mm and slightly better control of vignetting. Distortion varies between barrel and pincushion but as the DxOMark scores reveal, the two are closely matched.

Compared against the firm’s slightly faster DT 55-200mm f4-5.6 SAM zoom from 2009, the newer E-mount model compares favorably overall but lacks its sibling’s sharpness wide-open. That makes the DT model much more practical even though it has rather lower uniformity. Both vignetting and distortion are well controlled but the DT has very noticeable chromatic aberration at 200mm. This is heavy enough to degrade image quality, although fortunately it’s more noticeable when stopped down.

Wide-open performance is disappointing at 210mm, and while the DT sibling has better center sharpness, it has rather high levels of lateral chromatic aberration.

Conclusion

Lenses are a mix of compromises and nowhere is that more obvious than with accessibly priced zooms. The Sony E 55-210mm f4.5-6.3 OSS is somewhat disappointing at the longer end of the zoom range, in terms of sharpness, but in every other respect the performance is well balanced. It may not satisfy demanding enthusiasts but, given the price, the lens is not an unattractive option for Sony Alpha users looking for a change in perspective from the kit lens.

One of the most disappointing realizations new DSLR owners face is that their 18-55mm kit lens only has a puny 3x zoom range. Coming from point-and-shoots with 10x, 20x, or even 50x zoom ratios, it can feel pretty limiting. The solution? .

The Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS (MSRP $349.99) is one such lens, providing enough zoom range to capture faraway subjects. It won’t rival a 60x superzoom for sheer reach, but it will take much better photos—especially if you know how to take advantage of it.

Best of all, it won’t break the bank. Sure, Sony had to make some sacrifices to get the price that low, but if you’re looking to add reach on a budget, this lens should be on your radar.

Who's It For?

The Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is one of a familiar breed of lenses: an entry-level telephoto zoom lens designed to be paired with the standard 18-55mm kit zoom.

On the plus side, this lens has enough reach for sports and wildlife photography, and includes helpful optical image stabilization (that's the ) that can help prevent blur from hand-shake at longer focal lengths. But there are downsides, too: Its small maximum aperture makes it less than ideal for dim shooting situations or very fast-moving subjects.

Credit: Reviewed.com / Chris Thomas

The included lens hood shields the front element from stray light.

To pack this much zoom into a compact $350 lens, Sony's designers had to use an aperture that closes down as you zoom in. At full telephoto, the aperture can't open any wider than f/6.3, which starves the sensor for light. In bright sunlight you'll be okay, but when the sun goes down you'll have to either use slower shutter speeds (resulting in blurrier photos) or higher ISO settings (grainier photos).

If you plan to do a lot of shooting in variable lighting, you'll want to consider a brighter lens, like the Sony FE 70-200mm F4 G OSS. However, that sort of lens will cost you a lot more money, in addition to being bigger and heavier. Unfortunately, there's no cheating physics.

Look and Feel

Though it's not too big or heavy, the Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS has a premium feel that many other affordable lenses lack—even those from market leaders like Canon and Nikon. Like other Sony lenses, it also has an extremely minimalist look. Most of the controls you’d usually find on a lens—stuff like autofocus and image stabilization—must be handled through your camera's menu.

Credit: Reviewed.com / Chris Thomas

At full telephoto, the E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS telescopes out pretty far.

The only physical controls on this lens are the prominent focus and zoom rings. And as you'd expect from a modern autofocus lens, the zoom ring is huge, while the focus ring comes across almost as an afterthought.

The zoom action is relatively smooth, and there’s a reassuring physicality to the mechanical action—especially if you're used to working with a Sony Power Zoom kit lens. The focus ring is also smooth, since it’s a focus-by-wire system. When you turn it, all you’re doing is telling the focus motor to move one way or the other. It’s much less responsive than mechanical focus systems, but common on modern autofocus lenses.

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Image Quality

Affordable telephoto zoom lenses are popular with consumers, but rarely excel in our test labs. The Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is a notable exception. It's certainly a much better lens at 55mm than it is at 210mm, but as long as you keep the aperture to f/8 or wider, it can deliver impressive results.

Credit: Reviewed.com / Kyle Looney

EXIF: 170mm, ISO 250, 1/800, f/6.3

In the lab, we were particularly impressed by the lens's ability to render very fine details in the center of the image. Small details like the texture of a piece of clothing or fine strands of hair are clearly visible. Even in the corners of the frame, most of our shots looked quite sharp.

There are certainly some caveats, though: At 210mm, the only aperture that yields consistently sharp shots is f/8. The lens struggles both wide open at f/6.3 and at smaller apertures from f/11 to f/22. That's a pretty tight window if you want high-quality shots at full telephoto, and it means you'll need quite a bit of light to get the job done.

Credit: Reviewed.com / Kyle Looney

EXIF: 176mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/6.3

In the field, the 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 impressed us with its control of optical defects like chromatic aberration and geometric distortion. Despite its restrictive maximum aperture, it also was able to produce smooth out-of-focus areas (though Sony's 50mm f/1.8 OSS is a much better choice if that's your primary concern).

Below you can see sample photos taken with the Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS mounted on the Sony A6000. Click the link below each photo to download the full-resolution image.

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Conclusion

Most new DSLR and mirrorless camera owners start with a standard kit lens—usually an 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 or something similar. These are good starter lenses, but they're better for landscapes and everyday snapshots than zooming in on faraway subjects. The Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is a lens that can bring those distant subjects closer, providing the extra reach you're looking for.

Credit: Reviewed.com / Chris Thomas

Sony's minimalist aesthetic keeps things clean.

Like all affordable zoom lenses, it makes compromises to keep the size and cost down, but for the most part they're smart choices. The limited maximum aperture is the biggest issue, starting at f/4.5 and shrinking to f/6.3 at full extension. That limits the amount of light that hits your sensor, meaning you'll often need slower shutter speeds or higher ISO sensitivity, which degrades image quality.

Sony's Optical SteadyShot (OSS) stabilization goes some way toward compensating for this issue. It helps correct for blur caused by hand movements at slower shutter speeds, but it can't correct for your subject's motion. That means this lens isn't ideal for anyone looking to shoot indoor sports like basketball or volleyball. It can work in those situations if you can't afford a brighter zoom, but you'll have to work a lot harder (particularly in processing your images) to get clean shots.

The 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is best suited to outdoor sports and wildlife photography, where there's plenty of light.

The Sony 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is far better suited to outdoor sports and wildlife photography, where there's plenty of light and you can use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. In those situations, it's certainly worth the $350 asking price and makes a great companion to an 18-55mm or 16-50mm kit lens. When evaluating any lens, we focus on four key areas: sharpness, distortion, chromatic aberration, and bokeh. A perfect lens would render the finest details accurately, wouldn’t distort straight lines or produce ugly fringing around high-contrast subjects, and would create smooth out-of-focus areas.

The Sony E 55-210mm OSS succeeds in checking off two of our major areas of concern—sharpness and chromatic aberration—but is merely average in terms of bokeh and overall distortion. Still, in its class of affordable zoom lens, the overall performance is quite strong.

Sharpness

A lens's sharpness is its ability to render the finest details in photographs. In testing a lens, we consider sharpness across the entire frame, from the center of your images out to the extreme corners, using an average that gives extra weight to center performance. We quantify sharpness using line widths per picture height (LW/PH) at a contrast of MTF50.

Mounted on the Sony A6000 in our test labs, the Sony E 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS proved itself to be a fairly sharp zoom lens.

Credit: Reviewed.com

Sharpness takes a huge hit at 210mm.

It's strongest at 55mm, where it's able to resolve well over 1,900 lines in the center of the frame, from the maximum aperture of f/4.5 through to f/8. Midway (50% from the center), that figure drops to roughly 1,700 lines, while the corners sink to about 1,400 lines. Generally speaking, that's quite impressive for a zoom; anything over 1,600 lines is considered sharp on this system.

At 135mm, the profile changes. The center resolves around 1,900 lines at f/5.6 and f/8, while the corners jump to between 1,550 and 1,700. But by 200mm, things get grim: At the maximum aperture of f/6.3, center resolution drops all the way to 1,250 lines while the partway and corners only resolve 1,050 and 1,150 lines, respectively. Those numbers improve at f/8 (1,525/1,225/1,225), but only slightly.

While performance at f/11 is acceptable from 55-135mm, we don't recommend going past the diffraction limit (f/8) if you can avoid it. The f/16 and f/22 performance, in particular, is very poor across all focal lengths.

Distortion

We penalize lenses for distortion when they bend or warp your images image, causing normally straight lines to curve.

There are two types of distortion: When the center of the frame seems to bulge outward toward you, that’s barrel distortion. It's typically a result of the challenges inherent in designing wide-angle lenses. When the center of the image looks like it's being sucked in, that’s pincushion distortion. Pincushion is more common in telephoto lenses.

Distortion from the 55-210mm OSS is quite consistent across the zoom range, with around 1% pincushion at 55mm, 1.8% pincushion at 135mm, and 1.5% pincushion at 210mm. That's not a huge surprise, since the lens only covers telephoto focal lengths. It's also not that troublesome—anything under 2% is quite easy to correct.

Chromatic Aberration

Chromatic aberration refers to the various types of “fringing” that can appear around high contrast subjects in photos—like leaves set against a bright sky. The fringing is usually either green, blue, or magenta and while it’s relatively easy to remove the offensive color with software, it can also degrade image sharpness.

We examined the 55-210mm's CA performance at 55mm, 135mm, and 210mm and found that it controls quite well for lateral/axial chromatic aberration. CA is most evident at 135mm, but even there it's still what we'd call minor. You may notice it in some shots, but it's easily corrected and will only be a real nuisance in the extreme corners of particularly high-contrast scenes.

Bokeh

Bokeh refers to the quality of the out of focus areas in a photo. It's important for a lens to render your subject with sharp details, but it's just as important that the background not distract from the focus of your shot.

While some lenses have bokeh that's prized for its unique characteristics, most lenses aim to produce extremely smooth backgrounds. In particular, photographers prize lenses that can produce circular bokeh that’s free of aspherical distortion (or “coma”).

Credit: Reviewed.com / Kyle Looney

EXIF: 176mm, ISO 250, 1/500, f/6.3

For a consumer-grade telephoto zoom, the Sony 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 does an admirable job of rendering these out-of-focus areas, even with its limited maximum aperture. The 210mm end of the zoom range provides the smoothest results, creating the shallowest depth of field.

The shot above is a best-case scenario for this lens: It does a good job of isolating the sign, but the background is also a significant distance behind. At the very least, this lens's bokeh doesn't have the "busy" or "nervous" quality common to small-aperture lenses; while backgrounds lack the dreamy quality we prize, they're not overtly distracting.

Meet the tester

TJ Donegan

Former Director, Content Development

@TJDonegan

TJ is the former Director of Content Development at Reviewed. He is a Massachusetts native and has covered electronics, cameras, TVs, smartphones, parenting, and more for Reviewed. He is from the self-styled "Cranberry Capitol of the World," which is, in fact, a real thing.

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Is Sony 55

The Sony 55-210mm f/4.5-6.3 OSS is far better suited to outdoor sports and wildlife photography, where there's plenty of light and you can use a fast shutter speed to freeze the action. In those situations, it's certainly worth the $350 asking price and makes a great companion to an 18-55mm or 16-50mm kit lens.

What is the 55 210 mm lens used for?

A 55-210mm lens has my most-used studio focal lengths, working especially well for product images and many other general studio applications. Most of the product images on this site were captured within the 88-210mm range and this range is ideal for larger products including vehicles.

How far can a 55

Designed for APS-C-format cameras, this 55-210mm lens perfectly complements many kit zooms by providing an 82.5-315mm equivalent focal length range for telephoto applications.

Is Sony 55 210 lens a full frame?

Sony makes E-mount lenses for both full frame and APS-C. The full frame ones are usually designated FE (as in Full E-mount). PS: Yes, the 55-210 is going to work on a full frame camera in crop mode, but you throw away lots of pixels. Would get much better results with an A6300 plus 55-210 instead!