The Sony E 16mm f/2.8 prime lens is fast and tiny, making it a very attractive option for travel photography if you’re using a Sony interchangeable lens camera that uses Sony E-mount. This lens is designed specifically for Sony cameras with APS-C cropped sensors (so not the full-frame Alpha cameras, for example).
The lens’s pancake design means that it projects less than an inch from the camera’s body. Mounted on an APS-C format body such as the Sony a6500, the lens’s 16mm focal length becomes the equivalent of what a 24mm lens would be on a full-frame camera. And that happens to be the sweet spot for my personal tastes when it comes to fast primes.
One thing to keep in mind if you’re comparing these shots to your own: the a6500 has in-body stabilization, and this lens has none of its own. Most of the a6000-series bodies — a6000, a6300, a6400 — have no stabilization at all, so with the same lens on one of those you might need faster shutter speeds in low light than I was able to get away with here if you’re shooting handheld (disregard if you’re using a tripod, obviously!).
It’s an old lens, and worth knowing that up front: the 16mm was one of the two lenses Sony launched the NEX system with in May 2010, alongside the 18-55mm kit zoom. It hasn’t ever been revised — there’s no Mk II — so a copy bought today is optically the same lens it was then. Most of them now change hands secondhand or come bundled with an old NEX or a6000-series body, which is how a lot of people end up owning one.
In the hope that it might be useful to see how it performs and what kind of perspective it gives in real-world shooting, here’s a selection of photos I’ve taken with this lens. They were all taken on a Sony a6500 body. I’ve included a range of apertures, although they’re heavily weighted towards large apertures — after all, if I’m using a fast lens, there’s a good chance I want to be using it wide open or close to that much of the time to take advantage of it. Otherwise, I might as well be using a slower (and often less expensive) lens.
These images were all shot in RAW and processed in Lightroom. I haven’t applied any of Lightroom’s corrections to them, such as the lens profile corrections for chromatic aberration or vignetting — but I did have the a6500’s automatic lens compensation feature enabled. So I’m not focusing as much on optical flaws as I normally would. So these are designed much less as a clinical lab test than to give a sense of what you can realistically expect to get out of the camera under real-world shooting conditions.
It’s worth spelling out what that compensation is doing, because it explains a lot about how these files look. The optical design here is a simple five-element formula, and it leaves real barrel distortion and corner vignetting on the table — Sony’s approach is to correct both in software rather than in glass. Lightroom, Camera Raw and Capture One apply the lens’s embedded correction profile to RAW files automatically, so if you open the same file in something that doesn’t, straight lines bow and the corners go dark. That’s normal for this lens, not a sign of a faulty copy.
What no profile fixes is resolution. The corners are soft wide open, and that’s the design rather than a bad sample — stopping down to somewhere around f/5.6 to f/8 evens the frame out, but it won’t turn this into a sharp lens. Since most of the photos below were shot at or near f/2.8, that’s what you’re looking at in the edges of the frame.
Sample images taken with a Sony E 16mm f/2.8 prime lens
If you’d like a closer look, you can click on each image to open a full-size version.
Optical correction tools
I deliberately haven’t applied extensive corrections to these images. And the general rule of thumb in photography is that it’s better to get the shot right at the time of capture rather than trying to fix it after. That’s a great aspiration, but it’s not always possible to do if you’re bumping up against limitations or flaws in gear, conditions, or technique.
But it’s worth mentioning that there are some excellent tools available to help address common issues with lenses, such as distortion, chromatic aberration, and lens vignetting when editing the images. All-round image processing apps like Lightroom Classic and Capture One have solid tools built in already that often cater to specific lens profiles (or you can make your own).
Some more specialized tools can take it even further. DxO, in particular, sets the gold standard. Their software is built on the foundation of their incredibly deep archive of data from their extensive lab testing of the optical performance of lenses and cameras. But there are some other excellent specialized tools available. These are well worth a look (and have free trials):
- DxO Pure RAW (for a suite of automatic RAW file corrections enhancement)
- DxO ViewPoint (correcting for distortion and geometry)
- Topaz Labs Sharpen AI (in addition to standard unsharp tools, includes focus correction and shake reduction)
- On1 NoNoise (includes Tack Sharp AI, which applies sharpening)
Key specs of the Sony E 16mm f/2.8 prime lens
- Focal Length: 16mm (35mm Equivalent Focal Length: 24mm)
- Maximum Aperture: f/2.8
- Minimum Aperture: f/22
- Lens Mount Type: Sony E
- Sensor Format Compatibility: APS-C
- Angle of View: 83°
- Minimum Focus Distance: 9.45 inches / 24 cm
- Maximum Magnification: 0.08x
- Optical Design: 5 Elements in 5 Groups
- Diaphragm Blades: 7, Rounded
- Focus Type: Autofocus
- Image Stabilization: No
- Filter Size: 49 mm (Front, threaded)
- Dimensions: (ø x L) 2.44 x 0.89″ / 62 x 22.5 mm
- Weight: 2.4 oz / 67 g
