Sony E 55-210 f4.5-6.3 OSS Zoom Range Tests – Real-World Examples

This isn’t a full review of the Sony E 55-210 f/4.5-6.3 OSS lens–I’ll get to that separately. My aim here is to just provide some quick visual examples that show the lens’s zoom range.

This lens is a good cost-effective option if you’re looking for a versatile long telephoto zoom to put on something like the Sony a6500 or a6000. It’s not especially compact–it does protrude out quite far from the camera body. And with a maximum aperture of f/4.5 when zoomed out and f/6.3 when zoomed in, it’s not blindingly fast. But it is light, versatile, priced competitively, and has built-in optical stabilization, all of which help it be a good travel photography lens, as well as a capable lens for wildlife or sports photography.

Getting technical, it features 13 elements in 9 groups, which includes two ED elements and two aspherical elements. It has a seven-blade circular diaphragm that helps with a nice smooth bokeh on the out-of-focus parts of the frame, has a minimum distance of 3.3 feet (1 meter), and has an internal focus, which means that the exterior of the lens barrel doesn’t rotate, which helps with faster, smoother focus and is also useful when using a circular polarizer filter. And if you’re adding a filter, it takes 49mm screw-on filters.

Here are a couple of side-by-side examples of it zoomed out to 55mm and zoomed in to 210mm. On the APS-C-sized sensor, that becomes effectively an 82.5mm to 215mm zoom range when converted to full-frame 35mm equivalent.

I shot these with the lens mounted on an a6000.

55mm210mm

55mm210mm

Price & availability

You can find the Sony E 55-210mm lens on Amazon and at B&H Photo. You can also find it as a part of a bundle kit with the Sony a6000.

It’s available in black and silver versions.