 So here's the new Sony 24mm G-Master, so hi, so who are you? So my name is Ben Pilling, I'm the technical marketing manager for digital imaging at Sony Europe. And this is a very hot anticipated, people are excited about this one, why? So this is our 24mm f1.4 G-Master, it's been highly requested from lots of different types of photographers, so whether that be landscape, architectural, astrophotographers, and it is a G-Master lens, so that means it has a G-Master quality. What that means is it has a supreme blend of resolution and beautiful bokeh. Those two things are actually very difficult to achieve at the same time. Quite often as manufacturers, we introduce elements into the lens to increase resolution. The downside to that is things like onion ring artefacts in bokeh and so on. With the G-Master lenses you have things like XA lens elements. Inside the 24mm f1.4 G-Master we have two XA lens elements, those are extreme as spherical. And those elements are made down to a precision of 0.01 of a micron. So that's talking about the smoothness of the surface, the accuracy of that smoothness is measured down to about a hundred thousandth of a millimetre. And the end result of that is the fact that you get extreme high resolution but also beautiful bokeh. All of that in a 24mm f1.4 lens. And from the way we construct it to be compatible not only with the lenses of today but also the lenses of tomorrow because as the number one sensor manufacturer within the industry we know what lenses are coming tomorrow. It's designed to have resolution to work on those lenses going forward into the future. The lens itself works, I mentioned different types of photography. Actually for astrophotography we're getting a lot of interest because there's minimal coma aberration coming up on there. So if you're shooting the stars at night we're very confident in the quality that comes out of this and lack of aberration within that even at fully open aperture. One difference you'll notice straight away if you're using other 24mm f1.4s is the size and weight. It's actually very small and compact. I think it's only 445 grams. On top of that on the lens itself you get an aperture ring so this means you can change manually the aperture on the lens itself. It does have an A-stop mode that means if you select here then you can change the aperture from the body rather than on the lens. As I move this round at the moment it's actually clicking as I move between the different positions. A lot of photographers like to know exactly what they're changing so if they're changing by a third of a stop, a full stop and so on. If you're a video guy and you're changing aperture you probably don't want that sound on there. So what you also get on this lens is a click switch. So here on the base you can see that there's a switch here and it means that if you're moving the aperture ring you're either going to have a click on there so if you want that feedback to tell you that you're changing the aperture you can have it but potentially if you're a video guy you might want to switch it to off and it's completely smooth and there's no sound coming off there so extremely useful. On top of that the 24mm does also have a focus hold button so this is on the side here and like lots of our other lenses this is customizable. So we do find that a lot of users like to assign this maybe to eye-auto focus. Again a very revolutionary Sony feature which is class leading within the market and there you can easily customize this button and control focus on that. So although this can be used for many different types of photography we probably don't even think of some kind of portraits on there but 24mm is an f1.4 you can still get beautiful de-focus backgrounds with minimal distortion and being a G-Master it is that beautiful blend of high resolution and beautiful bokeh. So because it's lighter and more compact is there any chance that it might be lower quality somehow or no? Absolutely not this is G-Master like I say our G-Master lenses are tested to extremely high standards so not to go too boring on you here but with MTF charts we internally test our G-Master lenses up to 50 line pairs per millimeter so again traditionally our G-Master lenses might be slightly bigger because we're saying we want to offer something with extreme high quality and we're like I say the size of it's bigger so what? With a 24mm it's a great combination because it is compact size but it's still G-Master quality and that means the almost resolution the almost quality beautiful bokeh and there's still no compromise this is a G-Master. So what makes a beautiful bokeh? Is it just some kind of engineering? So that is a great question actually a lot of people don't ask that so a lot of people are interested in how the bokeh of a lens looks and quite often see on forums when a lens is released people say what's the bokeh like? It's very difficult because actually a lot of testers there's no standard chart test where you can say this is great bokeh, this is not great bokeh things that we look at is is it circular so that's obviously like say depending partly on the aperture try and make sure it's got a circular aperture but also the lens elements within that can also contribute it so it might be that you get some form of vignetting or something caused by the lens elements that contribute towards how circular your bokeh is. There's also the kind of smoothness so in terms of the edge of the bokeh do you get hard lines on that? Again if it's hard lines going around the edge of it it's a little bit distracting where you feel so you want something that's a bit smoother in its fall even within that area of bokeh that you can see yourself. One thing I mentioned before was that if you put elements inside a lens a spherical element so it makes you get really good resolution quite often you can get onion rings so basically lots of circles coming up within the bokeh but the XA lens elements which are actually two within the 24mm how do you get that blend of high resolution but no onion rings with on there as well. On top of that our G-Master lenses are designed by precision engineers and they have software beforehand which actually helps them give them an idea in their construction as they change it in design as to what the bokeh will look like. So again as well as the traditional testing charts of resolution looking at contrast as well as high resolution you also have this coming into the fact that it's something that's important that we're trying to deliver a lens that's top quality all round. So the G-Master is a top class from Sony and so what's so different about G-Master? So the difference about G-Master is the fact that because we make most of the sensors within the industry have more than 50% market share of sensors we know where sensors are going and what does that matter? Well it matters because you can have like I say a really high resolution sensor but if your lens is not good enough for that sensor then you're going to get bad image quality and as such because we know what's coming in the future it means we can design our lenses to be high resolution. Some people like say if they use particular older lenses you find that the resolution of those lenses because they're from film times is not high enough and as you've seen with digital sensors it's going higher and higher with megapixel in general and it puts more demands on the lens. Sony being the provider of many lenses with many sensors within the market we know the direction that's going to go. So let's give you an example. When we launched Alpha 7 and 7R back in 2013 our guys in Tokyo knew that a 42 megapixel sensor was coming up with the Alpha 7R Mark II and that was long before that was launched and they made sure that from the start of the launch of our full frame mirrorless system they made every lens to be able to resolve higher than 42 megapixel resolution and in the same way the G Master series are designed to go even further so this means that our guys in Tokyo know what's going to come in the future and we have a marketing message for these which says tomorrow's lenses today. It sounds a little bit cliche or cheesy but it's actually true because they know what's coming and the internal tests we do on these make sure it's rigorously done so that if you're using this lens in a few years time it's still going to give you amazing quality on the cameras of tomorrow. So you even mentioned I think in the first release in the first conference maybe 100 megapixel kind of this kind of stuff right? Potentially. So I'm not sure we put exactly a bigger right on there but we do look very much in the design of our whole system at what's going to be coming and how we're going to develop that further so we're quite unique because not all manufacturers make their own lenses, sensors and processes and within the design of our system we make sure that those things marry up and we also look in the long-term plan so we know what's going to come so we can match those all together. So right now I'm using the G Master 16-35 I set it at 24 so this is at 2.8 right? So what's going to be the difference if I use this one instead? So you do get that much larger aperture like I say I mean the 16-35, 2.8 is a very popular lens and talking from a personal point of view I work at a lot of events like this at Photokina personally this is the lens I've been most requested actually in my personal experience we have people who are interested like I say in many different types of photography sometimes architecture, sometimes landscape and so on I mentioned astro before and that bright aperture just gives you greater flexibility and you find that like I say that's whether it's low light quality with the likes of astro where it's really crucial to have that big aperture as I mentioned before we have minimal co-mraperation but also you get things like sports photographers those guys they're shooting most of the time to telephoto this kind of thing what happens is though maybe 5% of the time maybe say at a football game when somebody scores a goal the players run up really close to them all of a sudden they need to be on a wide angle lens and something like this which is 24mm f1.4 they can pick up attached to another camera it's light, it's small, it's easy to fit in another kit they can hit that f1.4 so they can get that real separation coming off the background and so whether you're looking for that for wedding photography, for landscape, for astro the bright aperture on there like I say is going to be able to make your subjects stand out even more than before and it's wide but the corners are very... they're not distorted, they're great so of course we try and keep distortion to a minimum and we think it does really well even at f1.4 we're very confident in this lens so sometimes with lenses you have to tone that aperture down but really the quality which comes out of it we're really proud of so this G-Master I'm using right now I think in the US it's $2200 so this is slightly more affordable in Europe we're looking at €1600 which is a great price for a lens which is extremely high quality and also very highly requested so it means it's a great option for our customers because they're able to look at our system and not only see a great lens line-up now a 34 frame E-mount lenses but also a line-up which offers things right across the field so whether you're looking at wide angle, telephoto, f2.8 zooms telephoto our 400mm f2.8 we offer something at different areas for different customers and that can be things like size and weight where you've got our 85mm f1.4 G-Master that lens is stunning and some people actually, like I say when we see them trying out our system they actually fall in love with that lens but we also have the likes of an 85mm f1.8 it's much more compact, much lighter, more affordable so if someone's not looking at the 85mm f1.4 G-Master it means that we have options for them out there as well and the 24mm G-Master here it gives that great combination of G-Master quality but at a more affordable price and that's really important when looking at a full frame system with 30 native lenses and don't forget that in terms of auto-focus and mirrorless you generally look at hybrid auto-focus with phase detection and contrast detection and that requires different motors from SLR lenses so inside this lens, the 24mm we have what we call direct drive SSM motors we've used those in some of our other lenses before but this one that's developed for this is actually newer and it's got three times the amount of thrust compared to our previous motor in that it's basically very quick and powerful but very accurate and it enables you to get great focus whether you're using hybrid auto-focus with stills or with video and as I mentioned the focus systems of SLRs lenses are very different so if you're to an adapter lens onto a mirrorless camera you find it's much better for stills and for videos going for the native mount and having 30 full frame-emount lenses it gives us great options for our customers So people buy lenses because they want to be future-proof that's also why you say that your engineers are future-proofing them right but you just mentioned that there's something that might be new in this in terms of the auto-focus compared to previous G-Masters does that mean that G-Masters get Mark II, Mark III, Mark IV you know, did they ever get this guy? like, you know what I mean? I know exactly what you mean and if my Tokyo colleagues tell me then I'll be told I can't tell you but actually like I say we'll listen to the market demands so as I mentioned, me personally I've been mostly requested this 24mm f1.4 that is actually the lens I physically have been asked most by customers if we get market feedback that the next lens you require is a Prime, is a Zoom, is something else like I say then we'll listen to that market feedback so that really is what drives what lenses are going to come in our lineup and it's great for gimbals so like I say, again it's rather small and light and you can see that just like I say it fits in the hand so nicely and it means that even a full frame system here you can get G-Master quality in a compact size that's nice and light and carry it around all day