Review Sony 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 SAL-75300 (APS-C)

Sony 75-300 mm is already on the market since 2008. It is a compact, lightweight telephoto zoom with an attractive price. This lens comes from the Konica Minolta series and the design of the Sony 75-300 mm is probably from 1995. This lens is available in the Netherlands for a little over 200 euros.

The Sony 75-300 mm has a 3 times zoom range with an angle corresponding to a 113 -450 mm telephoto zoom lens on a camera with a full-frame sensor.

Construction and autofocus

The lens is made of plastic and is therefore light for a telephoto zoom lens. A lot of light lenses are carried out with a plastic bayonet plastic nowadays. But the Sony 75-300 has a metal mount.

The drive of the autofocus goes pretty fast, but noisy.

Of searching in low light or low contrast is little evidence. During testing, the Sony 75-300 was sometimes faster than the much more expensive Sony 70-300 mm and the Sony 70-400 mm in subjects with low contrast.

Image stablization

Vignetting

The Sony 75-300 mm has been tested on a Sony A77 camera, which was set to in-camera compensation for vignetting. In practice, you can still occasionally encounter a slight degree of vignetting, as you can see in the image here. Apart from 300mm, vignetting is no longer visible from aperture 5.6 using in-camera correction.

Move your mouse over the image to view the other Imatest measurement results for vignetting.

Distortion

Bokeh

Sony shows that thanks to the circular aperture, you have a nice blur process. The bokeh is really nicely round, but the rings show slight edges, making the bokeh restless.

Click your mouse on the right image for a larger image of the bokeh at 300 mm.

At 75 mm, there is no nice bokeh, because the relatively small opening in conjunction with the APS-C sensor gives too much depth of field (see image below, move your mouse over the image to view bokeh at 75 mm on 100% ). The bokeh at 75 mm also displays sharp, bright edges. Also, the lens exhibits at the corners that which is sometimes called "Cat's Eye Bokeh;" a phenomenon that occurs in lenses that suffer from vignetting (picture below right).

Flare

We have encountered remarkably little flare during the testing of the Sony 75-300 mm. Only in a single shot of the moon (right), slight ghosting is visible. Good performance.

Resolution

The Sony 75-300 mm together with the Sony A77 get a maximum resolution of 2000 LW/PH. The corners remain little behind in terms of resolution at the center. That's a good performance, but the better Sony telephoto zoom lenses like the Sony 70-400 mm or the Sony 70-300 mm score even better.

Chromatic aberration

Chromatic aberration is relatively high with the 75-300 mm. In practice you may encounter chromatic aberration, as shown in the two image croppings. But you have to magnify far before it becomes visible (left: 100% and right: 200%). Fortunately, chromatic aberration is easily corrected by software.

Sony 75-300mm f/4.5-5.6 SAL-75300

Look in our overview of tested lenses or in our overview of Sony mount lenses to compare the performances of this lens with other lenses.

Pros

• Light and compact

• Inexpensive

• Low burden of flare

Cons

• Noisy autofocus
• Lower resolution at the longest focal length
• Somewhat sensitive to chromatic aberration