Sony 50mm f/2.8 Macro

Sony’s 50mm Macro lens is fairly squat and compact with a simple design.

The Sony 50mm f/2.8 Macro has a good-sized manual focus ring with a very fine grooved grip and Full/Limit focus switch. A handy addition is the focus lock button on the side of the lens barrel – when pressed, the focus is locked in that position. With the 1.5x crop factor of Sony D-SLRs, this lens has a film-equivalent focal length of a 75mm macro lens. For a lens costing just shy of £400, the build doesn’t really reflect this – it’s finished to a good standard, but feels quite plasticky and it would have been nice to see a bit more metal when you’re paying this kind of price.  
  Autofocus is loud – there’s no motor to cut down on noise during AF, and you’ll experience a fair amount of mechanical whirring as it focuses, making it very noisy. AF speed isn’t actually that bad – it can hunt quite a bit, but on the whole it focuses pretty fast. The manual focus ring is a little bit stiff in use, with just a tad too much friction, while the lens extends almost double its length when it’s focused down at 1:1.