image courtesy of Lens rentalsOne of lens rental’s customers dropped a Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS jamming the focus system, so they decided to do a tear down to fix the problem. The tear down took 6 hours to complete. The read is lengthy and is two parts long. Part one goes rear half of the lens tear down, while part two is from after their snack break and includes the front portion of the lens tear down.
- The Sony 70-200mm f/2.8 GM has a lot of solid construction with heavy metal barrels and proper weather sealing.
- The rollers, cams, and screws seem appropriate for what they do. They aren’t over-engineered by any means, but certainly adequate.
- The lens is designed to take apart in the middle. That’s really different for a 70-200 f/2.8, but we’ve seen some super telephoto lenses that are similar. I doubt it’s going to break in half if you drop it. Or more to the point, if you drop it hard enough to break it in half, other stuff would be breaking too.
- There’s a lot of impressive engineering in here, but not what we (from a take-it-apart perspective) would call elegant. It looks similar to a Nikon design, which isn’t a bad thing, Nikon makes lots of great lenses. That are a pain to work on. Pain to work on often (but not always) translates into expensive to repair.
Apparently Sony’s new lens is heavily inspired by Nikon’s lens design, but they try a lot of new things too. Like the image stabilization system is extremely well built so it shouldn’t break easily if dropped. Lens Rentals also reverified their poor image quality results and stand behind the their test showing that the lens is not very sharp.
Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 B&H Photo / Amazon / Adorama
via Lensrentals
