New Member with question regarding A7s and 5-210MM

[Grimmy]

Hey all.  I use my Fujifilm X-T1 for stills and recently purchased a Sony A7s for video.  My question is, does the 55-210MM lens work well on the A7s? I been trying to find sample video of the two combined but have not been able to find anything. Please let me know! Thanks 

[LeButler]

Welcome Grimmy! I should preface this with the fact that I don’t own the lens myself, only know of it.

 

The good:

OSS: reduces shakieness somewhat;

Value: decent image quality for superzoom at that price;

Zoomring: consensus is it's smooth and well-weighted.

 

The bad:

Focus-by-wire: Some dislike the slight disconnect/very slight lag this introduces. Same is true for most E-mount lenses;

AF motor noise: consensus is it's averagely loud, ie will be audible unless using an external mic;

Variable aperture: need to avoid/be aware that if aperture is set wide open, DoF and exposure will change if you later zoom in;

Designed for smaller crop sensors: Field of view will be 83-315mm which is rather long. It will use less than half the camera’s sensor, meaning much worse low light performance (and only 5.3MP photos).

 

Ideally you should look at look at lenses named FE rather than E, the former are designed for the Fullframe sensor of the A7 series.

The lens designed for the job is the (massive&expensive) Sony FE 28-135mm. The closest fullframe equivalent to the 55-210mm is the Sony FE 24-240mm. Since you'll be manually focussing for video there's always the option of using a non-native lens like a Canon EF 28-135mm or EF 70-200mm F4 (tho I don't know how suited those particular examples are for video).