Sony 135mm f1.8 GM Lens Review

Introducing the new Sony 135mm f/1.8 G Master lens, a brand new offering in the G Master line up of high quality lenses and the new 135mm certainly has a lot to offer.

Image Quality

A 135mm lens is fantastic for shooting portraits, it gives you some great compression allowing you to create background separation and especially here with this lens, you’re going to get some lovely bokeh shooting wide open at f/1.8.

But 135mm can also be great for shooting landscape, it allows you to get a different perspective on things and that compression can help to pull different elements of the shot together in a way that you can’t create with a wider lens. Whether shooting portraits or landscape (or anything else for that matter), this lens is sharp; in fact it might be one of the sharpest 135mm lenses I’ve ever used even when shooting wide open. While shooting portraits in particular, I was able to get a lot of detail on the models face which contrasted nicely with the smooth bokeh behind.

The lens has 11 rounded aperture blades which help to make the bokeh nice and smooth. Inside the lens, it has XA lens technology which suppresses spherical aberrations and ED and Super ED glass to suppress chromatic aberrations and the ultimate result of that is that you get lovely, smooth, clean bokeh.

Build and Feel

The lens itself is a decent size, it’s fairly big but actually, it’s not as heavy as you might think. It actually sits quite nicely on the front of the A7III which is what I was using. It doesn’t feel too front heavy, and on top of that, it’s got some nice features on the lens as well.

There’s an aperture ring which I always think is nice, it makes it super easy to control the aperture and on top of that, there’s a declicker for video use.

In addition to that, there are two customisable AF buttons on the lens which let you do things like hold focus easily without ever having to move your eye from the viewfinder.

There’s no IS in the lens, although you’ve still got stabilisation in the body if you’re using something like the A7III but for me, the lack of IS never really caused any problems and it means that Sony have been able to keep the lens at a decent size.

Ultimately, this is probably one of the nicer 135mm lenses that I’ve used, the image quality is just superb, the bokeh is lovely and it’s nice and sharp. On top of that, it’s actually pleasant to shoot with, it’s big, but it doesn’t feel too bulky or heavy.

You can watch our video review for more of our thoughts on this lens.