Sony 14mm F1.8 GM Review - Astrophotography and more! 

Much thanks to you Alyn, your videos were and are totally an insparation for me to compose better landscape astro! Cheers man, and I'm looking forward to seeing you get your hands on this lens yourself :)

I tried this lens last night with milky way in New Zealand. @ f/1.8 , the coma at the corner of the image is still there. So according to Chris, it is true that it is not Zero-Coma but it might be very minimal compared to sigma ( I ve never used Sigma though).

ikr! Urban Landscape anytime soon? Chris?

Thank you! I definitely found it challenging to say the least

You too!

It does, now do we have a lesson for calculating stars movement from you Gerald? My old point-and-shoot is ready 🤓

Is there an embargo on video test for the 14mm?

It's so Nice and so Compact!

Gotta try a tracker one day for sure! Cheers :)

@@vladimirkabanov617 Yo seriously, you've got all this expensive gear and still no star tracker? Check out MoveShootMove tracker, it's very portable and should do just fine up to 85mm.

@@jkbooo4378 Well it took me years to save up for and get this gear, star tracker is not a priority, but thanks for the tip!

Hello Vladimir (great name btw :) ), my personal choice would be 20mm f1.8. I have shot with a 24mm focal length a lot (though on a different system) and I always wanted something just a little wider. But this is just "my eye" - best thing to do is try both if there is a possibility. For the Sony system both lenses are absolutely great for optical quality and will both shine for the applications you've mentioned!

And for your second question, I use sequator to stack stars (freeze foreground mode) and photoshop to do focus stacking. Cheers!

@@vladimirkabanov617 Thank you for your advice! A am also going to buy Canon R5. Does Canon have any wide angle lens that can quality match Sony 24mm F1.4 GM or 20mm f1.8 for Astrophotography?

@@leites1975 You are welcome!! As for Canon, I am not sure - never shot on the system. They should have some good wide angle glass, I imagine, maybe for the old mount at this point - should be easy to find some reviews.

@@richrollin4867 Thank you for your reply

Maybe the 50mm 2.0? It’s highly recommended for Astro

@@4sapphireb Sure. I like the Ultron and Nokton lines because it still want some character. They’re by no means vintage but they’re also not clinical. But I also only shoot film so a little spherical aberration looks great and doesn’t stand out at all. And when I say a little I mean a little. These lenses would look amazing on any digital sensor.

Thanks Seth! A little headlamp, and a little cell phone screen, and voila!

My wife sometimes shoots astro, so she totally understands.

I complain about being tired all the time so there really was no change here. She's super supportive about whatever I do.

If you can afford the 12-24 f/2.8 then that's going to be your best bet.

Thanks for the question! I absolutely think that tracking is a useful tool for landscape astro, especially when shooting over 24mm focal lens. With that said, I was stunned to see how well you can stack static shots (no tracker) even at 70mm focal length on A7RIV, so its not that tracker is an absolute necessity to shoot this kind of astrophotography. For me personally, if I had all the money in the world I'd be buying a tracker myself, but for now I am completely happy with results I can get (in terms of balancing star trailing and noise) with just a good serdy tripod :) One thing to keep in mind is that, even with a tracker, the camera sensor will not like very long exposures (say over 1 minute). You will start seeing hot pixels everywhere, and weird artifacts around the frame edge. So even with a tracker, my understanding is that folks shoot a series of shorter exposures (say 30 seconds) and then again stack those together. In this sense, a tracker is an added step into the workflow. I hope this helps!

@@vladimirkabanov617 what an insightful professional answer! Thank you sir

@@frankluo230 thank you for the kind words, and you are very welcome! :)

we shot the video on a 20mm during the night shoot

This was shot on the Sigma 28-70mm F2.8, except the night shoot which was on Vladimir's Sony 20mm F1.8.

Bottom line from my experience with both lenses - both can be used to capture great lanscape astro images. While Sony is an excellent lens, the vignette is really noticable. I'd say they about equal each other - issue with Sigma's coma wide open vs issue with Sony's vignette wide open.

They already made that kind of filter. Search for Kaiser.

Stc optics as well

That's a really fair observation Dimanatti. I think this effect may be due to the way either lens handles distortion. Sony seems technically better, but it comes down to personal preference for such a wide field of view. After shooting both lenses, I still like my Sigma, you are right - the size of the Sony is the most compelling facto here for sure. The bottom line, both lenses produce great results :)

@@vladimirkabanov617 Yes both are great, but if you was to ask me what would i pick for my personal use, it would be the Sony G master, Compact size, aperture ring, different shooting experience and different image rendering. But again they just tools a the end of the day. I always tell people to try before you buy since everyone is different. And btw love your work, Keep it up Vlad.

@@dimanatti totally agree with you! And thanks so much for the support, truly appreciate it!

The vignetting is what really stood out as a negative for me as well with the Sony. It makes sense really, I mean, something had to be sacrificed to get the size this small! But I totally also agree, I hate to admit that I would often leave my Sigma at home when going on a hike just due to size and weight.

@@vladimirkabanov617 I think the corners of the Zeiss 21 Distagon were more like f4 or even f5.6 & it was only the very centre that was f2.8. For nightsky work, I found it almost unusable. Judging from your images, the GM14 doesn't look quite as bad as that though, where you able to correct in post adequately to dial the vignetting out?

@@TheLDunn1 Makes sense. Ive played around with corrections in lightroom, just qualitatively corners looked like they needed at least 1-1.5 stop correction to start looking like Sigma (both wide open). So quite a bit of extra noise there if you want to even out the exposure. For many shots its not a big deal, and with my edits I often add a vignette anyways. But its of course much better to start with an even file and drop the shadows where you want them.

You have just described the struggle of my teenage life ahaha

@@vladimirkabanov617 great astrophotography, man! Hope you are doing well and keep shooting these beautiful shots!

@@easterling9489 Thank you so much man! Really appreciate the kind words and support. Cheers!

Hi Christian, I can totally see where you are coming from, I think its important to note that from the start (arguably) both of these lenses are the best we currently have for a 14mm focal length across all systems. Furthermore, both lenses can be totally used for the application of landscape astrophotography to yield fantastic results. And lastly, neither of the lenses is still totally perfect. I would be happy to share a couple of stacked tiffs for your own direct comparison of Sony vs Sigma with you. You can reach me via email or instagram.

The stacked photos look pretty flat (as does the raw in these shots). I've done my best being duy-diligent with processed jpegs - I'd say they are a very real representation of these lens' performances. You can find those in dpreview gallery, and feel free to dm me with any questions :)

@@vladimirkabanov617 Thanks for getting back to me! I don't think I'm communicating clearly enough, I'll try to be clearer! I'm interested in how the processed Sigma shots compare to the processed Sony shots. I see one example in this video but, even at 4k resolution, they look nearly identical to my eye. I'd love to see the processed Sigma compared to the processed Sony at, say, 100% magnification to compare potential differences in sharpness better. (Great shots, btw, I'm trying to go to your website to check out more but nothing is loading on my end, glad they guys brought you on to test this one!)

@@premiumbitter Cheers!! I got you, you can dm me via email or instagram and I can share a couple of stacked tiffs thru google drive

@@vladimirkabanov617 Rad! Just sent you a DM on IG :)

those are the G-TECH hand warmers that we looked at in an earlier video. Highly recommended.

Hello, would you mind elaborating on what you exactly mean by "wow factor"?

@@princeharbinger 24GM is a landmark in Sony history. It undoubtedly surpassed all older competitors in image quality and size weight. Til today there hasn't been a Nikon Canon Panasonic 24mm F1.4 for mirrorless to challenge it. At its announcement, Sony was so proud that not only 24GM had a single product announcement by itself, but also Sony arranged the entire Sony camp, ambassador group a trip to explore the lens. It literally wowed the photo world. In other GM primes, the gap is much closer.

The ideal comment for 0.00000002% of the population, who happen to have too much time. The nichest of opinions and hardly worth a comment :)

@@vladimirkabanov617 Ah, you are him, congrats. but the only one......

... must resist the set up...

'That'

That's what she said

@@pacheaco727 lmaoooo I didn't even realize I gave you the cleanest setup ever

Not really

Fuji shooters can stop pretending and spend a $50 and get a real film camera... why would you want a pretend film camera when you can buy the real deal for absolute peanuts.

@@arunashamal or they can ignore your thoughts regarding their personal preferences and keep shooting. Just saying.

@@Eltargrimm But can they? Just like a vegan Fuji shooter must need to tell everyone about it. Can they ignore everyone else and do their own thing without seeking approval? lol.. not gonna happen.

Yeah that was amusing. I mean technically sure, the earth is moving through space, but not at a speed that would show up in his 15 second exposures. And the stars moving... that would take centuries to pick up at that focal length. It's of course the rotation of the earth that limits the exposure time.

@@atarkus8 The wheel in the sky keeps on moving.. :) Check out 200 proofs the Earth is not a spinning ball by my friend Eric Dubay and History of Flat Earth.. Lots of excellent photography in those videos. i promise watching them will be enlightening