The Sony 70-350mm is my favorite telephoto lens when I don’t want to carry around too much weight.
It’s equivalent to a 105-525mm lens (on full-frame) which makes it ideal for wildlife and bird photography.
I’m a big fan of third-party lenses, but if you’re looking for the best wildlife, sports and bird lens, this is it. It’s long enough to capture small birds, let alone bigger animals that are quite far away.
Here’s my summary of the Sony E 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 with the most important information.
Pros:
- Super light and easy to carry around
- Excellent image quality and colors
- Auto focus is reliable and fast enough for wildlife
- Weather-sealed, not like GM lenses, but good enough
- Image Stabilization works very well
Cons:
- Soft image quality at 350mm when wide open
- Minimum focus distance at 70mm is a bit too short
- Not usable for indoor sports
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Sony 70-350mm: Image Quality
From 70mm to 350mm, this G series lens does not disappoint. It’s optically great and shows very little chromatic aberration and no flare. I usually shoot wide open at all focal lengths and never have to worry about sharpness or loss of quality.
While it’s sharp throughout its entire zoom range, I have found that 350mm at f/6.3 can be a little bit underwhelming but only if I crop in. Stopping to f/8 greatly improves the sharpness, but again, unless my subject is really far away or I don’t plan on cropping, it’s not too big of a deal.
This is an incredible lens that can be used for wildlife and sports, as well as portraits, travel and landscape. It’s really easy to isolate a subject, especially on APS-C cameras like the Sony A6700, where this lens can go up to 525mm (full-frame equivalent).
A lot of people ignore telephoto lenses for landscape, but they can be an awesome tool to get unique shots and perspectives. It’s not easy to frame with ultra-wides, especially if you are a beginner because you can easily get too much in your shot and end up with no actual subject at all.
Bokeh
With 7 aperture blades on the 70-350mm, bokeh looks okay. The longer your focal length, the blurrier the background, which is why telephoto lenses can create nice looking bokeh even at smaller apertures.
When it comes to animal photography, it’s important to treat the background almost as equally as important as your main subject. You have to pay attention to where to light falls, and that your background doesn’t have many distracting elements.
You can always use the clone tool in Lightroom to take out little bits, but it’s often your background that makes birds/animals really stand out.
Sharpness
I’ve got absolutely zero complaints when it comes to sharpness. I mentioned that at 350mm f/6.3 it’s softer than at other lengths, but let’s look at a couple of 100% crops to see if it’s bad.
No sharpness, texture or clarity applied (only color-corrected RAW file).
This looks perfect to me. The Sony A6700 has a 26 megapixel sensor, which allows you to crop in quite heavy. If I applied some extra sharpness to this cropped image you couldn’t even tell that it’s not the original size.
Here’s a more challenging example (because the subject is smaller and further away).
If you ignore the noise, this 100% crop looks more than usable. Both of these examples were shot at 350mm, which is the “weakest” spot of this lens. Not bad right?
The Sony 70-350mm is not for indoor sports.
Because of its small aperture, you can not use it indoors without raising your ISO well over 2,000. Lightroom’s Denoise is a life saver, but many indoor places don’t have enough light to get a proper exposure, especially if your subject is moving fast. At 70mm it’s got an aperture of f/4.5, which is acceptable, but as soon as you go over 150mm the aperture will be too small.
This is an outdoor lens.
Animals, birds, kids running around, planes, car races, professional outdoor sports, all of these will be perfect with the 70-350mm G. Its zoom capability can get you super close to your subject.
The Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 does not accept lens converters (1.4x or 2x), which is disappointing if you compare it to full-frame telephoto lenses. Still, the aperture would be 1 or 2 stops smaller with a converter, making it ~f/8 or f/11 at 350mm. Definitely not great for many scenarios.
Sony 70-350mm: Build Quality
My favorite thing about this lens is how compact it is.
It weighs 625g and has a 67mm filter thread.
It’s light enough to carry around for the whole day and not feel tired at all. Big telephoto lenses such as Sony 200-600mm have their charm and advantages, but that weight/size often makes me question if I even want to take pictures at all. The Sony 70-350mm doesn’t have this issue. It fits easily in my small camera bag or even my jacket for when I’m casually traveling.
It’s weather-sealed (dust and moisture resistant) which is quite rare for APS-C lenses. I’ve shot in rain countless of times and never encountered any issues with the 70-350mm, but you should always be careful.
It has an AF/MF switch, Optical Steady Shot on/off switch, as well as a custom button in the middle of the lens. There’s also a lock button to stop the lens from creeping when pointed downwards, although I don’t recall of ever seeing it (this is more common with heavier lenses).
Minimum focus distance at 70mm is 1.1m (3.61″) which I found to be a bit disappointing, especially when I wasn’t photographing animals. At 350mm, the minimum distance required to focus is 1.5m which is quite solid.
Related: Sony APS-C vs Full-Frame – What’s the Difference?
On the left we have the Sony A6700 + Sony 70-350mm, whereas on the left we have a full-frame Sony A7 IV + Sigma 150-600mm.
Both lenses in the image above have a similar field of view, but the Sony 70-350mm is 3x lighter, half the size and price as well. Compared to Sony’s 100-400mm and 200-600, the price difference is even bigger.
This is why I’m a big fan of APS-C cameras, especially now that denoise programs allow us to greatly improve the noisy images they output at higher ISO’s. Less weight to carry around and more money saved, although both systems have their own advantages.
You can use the Sony 70-350mm on full-frame cameras without any issues, but it helps to have a large resolution camera (like the A7R series) to make up for the automatic APS-C crop it will apply.
Related: Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 – Photo Gallery (15 Examples)
Snow, rain, desert, the 70-350mm can handle it all. It feels very solid in hand, and both rings (zoom & focusing) are easy to grip and rotate. It comes included with a lens hood.
Sony 70-350mm: Auto Focus
The Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 features an XD linear motor focusing system. It’s one of the few APS-C lenses to even come with this design, which already tells you that it’s intended for serious action work. That’s usually reserved for full-frame lenses!
It focuses quickly and quietly, and I rarely experienced any hunting. Better said, it didn’t feel worse than any of the telephoto lenses I have used so far. For birds and animals, it managed to lock onto them even in bad conditions (low contrast, bad weather), although this greatly depends on the camera you use. With the Sony A6700 and A7 IV (both used for this review) I can rely on their AF systems to get the best out of this lens.
To sum up, it’s perfect for fast wildlife and action and you won’t regret it.
Sony 70-350mm: Image Stabilization
I took both images at 1/20 and 350mm and you can really how bad the second example is. I can’t imagine shooting at 350mm without any stabilization, although you should remember that it only corrects your movement and not your subject.
With OSS (Optical Steady Shot), this lens is great regardless of whether your Sony body has stabilization built-in. For photo and video, it will help correct your footage
Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 G OSS: Verdict
The Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 G OSS is easily the best APS-C telephoto lens for Sony out right now.
Again, my favorite thing about is that I won’t be tired after 1 hour of shooting with it. No tripods, no monopods, no extra accessories are needed to be able to use this lens hand-held at 350mm (equivalent to 525mm).
It’s got an OSS that helps to stabilize when shooting with slow shutter speeds, and image quality is great wide open at all focal lengths. If you’re looking for maximum sharpness at 350mm you might need to stop down to f/8, but as you can see in my examples above it’s hardly an issue.
There’s almost no amount of chromatic aberration or flare, while distortion and vignetting are minimal and easy to correct anyways. On top of that, it’s weather-sealed which makes it a good contender for safaris and extreme wildlife photography.
You can buy the Sony 70-350mm at Amazon here.
Sony 70-350mm: Related Articles
- Want to see more Sigma 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 images? We have a full gallery with 15 images from different photographers available here.
- There are over 100 lenses to choose from, but these are The Only 3 Lenses You Need for Sony APS-C
- Here’s the official Sony 70-350mm f/4.5-6.3 specification list from Sony’s website.
- How to blur the background and getter shots? Read my full aperture tutorial here, as well as shutter speed and ISO speed guides.
