| A380: Sony 18-55mm SAM vs 18-70mm DT |
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A few days before the official launch I got from Sony Switzerland the brand new Alpha 380, along with the 3.5-5.6/18-55mm SAM and 4-5.6/55-200mm SAM. Sony asked me to make a few printable images for the next issue of their "Fotospiegel". Along with this I did also a "quick & dirty" comparison of the new Sony 18-55mm SAM kit lens and the older (often criticized) Minolta / Sony 18-70mm DT. While the new kit lens offers a similar mechanical construction as the old one, the optical performance is much better - at 18mm, at 35mm, and - to a lesser extent - also at 55mm.
The new Sony 18-55mm Kit lens is a real improvement over the let's say "less-than-perfect" 3.5-5.6/18-70mm DT which was a Minolta legacy lens. While in terms of building quality the 18-55mm SAM clearly is a kit lens (the built in AF motor e. g. is quite noisy), its optical performance is quite astonishing. CAs have gone completely, vignetting seems to be quite low, and detail resolution has improved a lot, especially in the 18-35mm range. Just when I got the A380 and the 18-55mm SAM I spent a few hours in Zurich and Bern, and returned with images of a surprising quality. Some of them will be printed in the next "Fotospiegel" in A3 and A4 size (30x40cm and 20x30cm).The jpegs directly out of the camera have quite a lot of detail (see 100% crops below). I expect that RAW data would provide even better results, but I didn't have access to RAW data converters capable of reading the A380 files.
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