Review by Klaus Schroiff, published August 2010

Introduction

"Kit" zoom lenses have a rather bad reputation regarding their build quality due to the use of cheap plastic and a rather "laissez-faire" clearance between the inner lens tube and the outer lens body. However, the Sony lens is an exception to the rule here. Surprisingly Sony used mag-alloy for the lens body as well as the focus ring and everything's just as tight here as it should be. The inner lens tube (made of plastic) wobbles a little bit though. Typical for such lenses it extends when zooming towards the long end of the zoom range. The front element does not rotate so it remains easily possible to use polarizers.

The AF performance is pretty good for a contrast detection system (albeit highly dependent on the base camera). AF operations are basically noiseless. Manual focusing works "by wire" so the focus ring is not directly coupled to the focus gears but to the AF motor. DMF ("Direct Manual Focusing" in Single Shot AF mode) is supported. OSS ("Optical Steady Shot") is Sony's lens-based image stabilization mechanism. It seems to be on par with the Canon and Nikon variants (better than Panasonic's OIS).