Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM Sample Images: Real-World Examples

Here’s a selection of photos I’ve taken using the Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM zoom lens. I’m sharing them here in the hope they might be helpful to others who are curious about how it performs in real-world shooting conditions.

First, a quick overview: The Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens is an E-mount lens designed for Sony’s full-frame cameras. It has an aperture range of f/2.8 to f/22 (with apertures constant throughout the zoom range), a 9-blade circular diaphragm, two aspherical and one XA elements, and is ruggedized with dust- and moisture-resistant construction. It’s one of the lenses in Sony’s G Master series of high-end lenses that work especially well on the Alpha series of cameras, alongside others like the Sony FE 16-35mm f/2.8 GM.

A couple of details worth getting straight before you look at the photos. This is the original 24-70mm GM (model SEL2470GM), which Sony announced in February 2016 as one of the first three G Master lenses, alongside the 85mm f/1.4 GM and the 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS. Sony added a second version in 2022, the 24-70mm f/2.8 GM II, which is a different optical design — smaller, lighter, and faster focusing — so if you’re comparing sample photos from different sources, it’s worth checking which version you’re looking at. Neither has optical stabilization, so on the a7 III I was relying on the body’s in-camera stabilization. This one takes 82mm filters, the same as the 16-35mm and 70-200mm GM lenses, and weighs 1.95 lb (886 g).

The 24-70mm performs very well in lab tests, but I wanted to see how that translated into real-world shooting. So I shot some photos to try it out, mounting it on a Sony a7III body.

The one lab finding that shows up often in real shooting is corner shading. At 24mm and f/2.8 the corners run around two stops darker than the center, a little more than that in the extreme corners, and it doesn’t largely clear until about f/5.6. It’s a one-slider fix in Lightroom, or you can let the lens profile handle it. One thing to watch if you’re using filters: a standard-thickness 82mm circular polarizer adds to that corner darkening, so a slim design is the better buy on this lens.

I’ve tried to include in this selection a range of subjects, apertures, focal lengths, and lighting conditions in the hope it gives at least some kind of representative idea of how it performs for general travel photography (even though I was shooting these close to home) — much like I did with the Sony FE 70-200mm f/2.8 GM OSS sample gallery.

These were all shot in RAW, and most of them have only been very lightly processed in Lightroom. For nearly all of them, I haven’t applied any extra sharpening or lens profile corrections such as fixing chromatic aberration (there’s basically none to fix, anyway). There are a few exceptions, mostly noted in the captions.

Worth one qualifier on the chromatic aberration, though. Independent chart testing does find lateral CA at 24mm and some color fringing at 70mm, but it sits out toward the edges of the frame rather than through the middle, which is why it rarely turns up as something I need to fix. If you do see purple or green fringing along a high-contrast edge, the lens profile clears it in a click — and note that Lightroom applies lateral CA correction automatically for profiled Sony lenses, whether you ask for it or not.

Sample photos taken with a Sony FE 24-70mm f/2.8 GM lens

You can find the aperture each was taken with in the captions below each photo. If you’d like a closer look, you can click on each image to open a full-size version.