Why everyone sleeps on this lens?

I decided to get my Sony a7CII in a kit with this 28-60mm lens. I have heard and read pretty average review on this lens but I first thought that it could be a good video lens. When I shoot photos with another camera I could use this lens on one of my Sony body to capture all sorts of B-roll. I am not too picky about depth of field and technical stuff for footage that ends on my Youtube channel. But I thought, what about shooting photos with this lens? With experience I know that in most scenarios when I shoot for myself I don’t need a lot of bokeh and this lens being so light for the versatility it offers made me thinking, could this be a solution to consider for casual everyday shooting or even a bit of travel?

This lens is not fast, from f4 on the wide end to f5.6 when extended to 60mm. The range is also limited, it is only 28-60, less than the other typical all purpose zoom lenses like the 24-70 or 28-70. OK, we are working with something more limited but when it comes to image quality there is nothing to worry about. Photos coming out of it are sharp at all apertures and all focal lengths. Below is a 100% crop to illustrate my point.

Making something more limited in terms of aperture and range comes with one major benefit, it becomes possible to make a lens very light. I think there is basically no other solution for full-frame cameras that still offers a decent focal range while being as compact and easy to carry as this lens. 28mm is the typical busy street photography focal length. Good for crowded and lively areas as well as typical narrow alleyways we have in Japan. On the long end 60 starts to be tight enough to play with abstraction. You can punch in and try composing cleaner or abstract photos. I like making comparisons with APS-C gear because one of their advantages is being lighter and more compact than Full-Frame. This lens is equivalent to a 18-40 F2.66-3.75 on APS-C. It has a shorter focal range than the famous Fuji 18-55 kit lens but when it comes to the “bokeh potential” we have more of it on the Sony lens and it is lighter than the Fuji. If you use a Sony camera that has 33mpx or more you can also very confortably use the APS-C crop mode and have a 90mm (non-native) field of view which further increase the versatility of this lens.

The lens is made in this collapsible format. When the lens is closed and in its most compact state it cannot be used. You have to open it and spin the zoom ring until you reach the 28mm mark to start shooting. It is a quirky and arguably a negative point about this lens. I personally like to have the lens in the smallest form when I am not actively shooting which means that the next time I want to shoot a photo I have to open it before being able to fire any shot. It creates a little pause when you can actually think about what focal length you will use for the scene you have in front of you. I think this could be very beneficial to speed up your study and your understanding of focal lengths and their impact on the final images. When you use a zoom lens by bringing the camera to your eye and zooming in and out to find the ideal focal length you will have the pictures, no doubt about that, but you will do it with less awareness of what focal length was used and why it worked in this scenario. So I think this seemingly bad feature about this kit lens can actually be a good thing for someone earlier in his photography journey, getting a good understanding of focal lengths faster usual.

The zoom ring is honestly quite unpleasant, not smooth at all. But again that creates an opportunity to learn more about focal lengths. If you want to experiment with 50mm for example but don’t own an equivalent prime lens you can stick this zoom lens at 50mm and you will be pretty sure that as long as you don’t move it purposely it will stay in place. More premium, bigger and heavier zoom lenses are more comfortable to use and their zoom ring are usually very pleasant to spin around. But it is common that because the setup becomes front heavy, the lens will also extend when it is hanging around your neck when you are not using it. If you wanted to shoot at a specific focal length for a defined period of time you can easily get cheated by the lens. shooting at 70 instead of 50 only realising this 10 or 20 shots later. It is another point where depending on your perspective and use case you can turn a pretty negative point about this 28-60mm lens into a positive point.

If you don’t have the budget to go for a more expensive and more premium zoom lens don’t automatically skip on this one. It offers great value for the price. a lot of people are getting the kit with no intention to use the lens. They just want to sell it back to make a tiny profit out of it which creates good opportunity on the second hand market to get it at a very reasonable price. I honestly see myself keep using this lens when I go somewhere that I don’t know. If I have no plans of shooting at night or taking creamy bokeh portraits this lens offers plenty of versatility at an unbeatable weight making my camera setup a lot more “pick-upable”. And we know that the best camera is the one we have with use, not the technically perfect camera setup that stays on the shelf because of how heavy and bulky it is.