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Sony DT 11-18mm coverage
The Sony DT 11-18mm offers ultra-wide angle to standard wide angle coverage. Mounted on an Alpha DSLR, it delivers a field of view equivalent to 16.5-27mm. At the wide-end, this gives you an enormous 104 degree field of view, which is fantastic for capturing big landscapes, large buildings, or small interiors. It’s invaluable when you literally can’t step back any further. Zoom in and you have a more typical 27mm wide angle coverage.
To demonstrate the coverage of the DT 11-18mm in practice, we mounted a Sony Alpha DSLR-A100 on a tripod and photographed our standard test scene with the lens zoomed-out, then zoomed-in. The results are below.
Sony DT 11-18mm with Alpha A100 |
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| 11-18mm at 11mm, f8 (16.5mm equivalent) |
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11-18mm at 18mm, f8 (27mm equivalent) |
The coverage examples clearly illustrate the massive field of view you can capture with the DT 11-18mm, and our sample images page shows the kind of situations where you might exploit it. Compared to other ultra-wide angle zooms though, the DT 11-18mm’s optical range is a relatively modest 1.63x. Canon’s EF-S 10-22mm and the Nikkor 12-24mm offer 2.2 and 2x ranges respectively, and in comparison the Sony certainly doesn’t feel like offering a broad range in practice.
To be fair though the DT 11-18mm is designed to fit in with lens collections which also probably include a general purpose lens which starts at either 18 or 16mm, so it either takes over perfectly or with the minimum overlap. To illustrate how the DT 11-18mm complements the standard DT 18-70mm kit lens, we shot the same scene with the latter, again zoomed-out, then zoomed all the way in. The results are below.
Sony DT 18-70mm with Alpha A100 |
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| 18-70mm at 18mm, f8 (27mm equivalent) |
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18-70mm at 70mm, f8 (105mm equivalent) |
The coverage examples above show how the DT 11-18mm and DT 18-70mm perfectly complement each other, although we’d still have preferred a longer optical range. On the upside though, at least there’s no gap in-between their ranges and you could always argue there’s a little overlap when using a general purpose lens which starts at 16mm.
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