A6300 Sony 18-135mm

[Willy Aucoin]

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Clayton d'Arnault is a Florida-grown writer-editor with a newfound love for photography, digital and analog. When he's not manipulating words, he's most likely out in the world perfecting his photographic eye or trawling eBay with a serious case of GAS.

One more anecdotal use case for this lens: I work in a local public radio newsroom. As our journalists are out covering stories, they are primarily interested in collecting audio for the airwaves. But the digital newsroom being what it is, everything goes up on the web and everything needs some kind of visual. For journalists already hauling around a bag of audio recording equipment, a camera with multiple lenses is less than ideal. Our aging Canon Rebels with 18-55mm kit lenses had proven too limited for many media coverage scenarios (along with just reaching their end of life). When it came time to upgrade the camera kits, I decided that the a6300 and this 18-135mm lens would provide the journalists with a lot of capability without adding much weight or bulk to their bags. They could grab wide photos of a crowd of demonstrators as well as get tight photos of our leaders from across the room in a fixed media pit. Pragmatism and flexibility over creative control. There is absolutely a need for these kinds of lenses, as unappealing as they might seem to those of us who crave total control over every aspect of the image (and consequently end up carrying ALL of our specialized lenses everywhere we go, ha!). The 18-135mm has proven to be versatile, robust, and an all-around good performer for us. Cheers!

I love this lens. It has my Sony Nex 7 come back to life again. This is a very nice and lightweight combo. With very good iq. Owning several full frame cameras I never pixel peep the images I just know they are good enough.

Thanks for your article. I have a Sony a6400 mirrorless camera with 18-135 mm Zoom Lens & one 7artisans photoelectric 35mm f1.2

Prime APS-C Manual Focus lens. Now I want to have one & only budget telephoto lens for my Sony a6400 camera for outdoor shooting mainly nature, mountains, birds & scenic views from a distant range. I am not a professional, I am an amaeteurist. Would you please advise me which telephoto lens should I buy within a very tight budget?

Last week, Sony announced the 24.2-megapixel a6400 APS-C mirrorless camera and I first got my hands on it. Here's a rundown of all my thoughts on it so far and how it performed with the 18-135mm f/3.5-5.6 OSS kit lens.

The Sony a6400 uses the same 24.2-megapixel APS-C Exmor CMOS image sensor as the previous a6300, and their image quality is similar. The body design, batteries and battery life, card slot, and more that aren't mentioned in the paragraph above are likely the same or nearly the same as the a6300. The most notable improvements of the a6400 over the a6300 are found in the autofocus system, video recording improvements, and the 180-degree flip up touchscreen.

As I mentioned, the Sony a6400 has been lab tested to an impressive autofocus speed of 0.02 seconds with the 18-135mm mounted. It has 425 autofocus points for both phase detection and contrast detection which covers 84 percent of the frame. This is the first Sony camera to be released that has Real-time Eye AF, which opens up the excellent eye detection continuous autofocusing to be used anywhere without requiring a separate button to activate. Later this year, Eye AF for Animals will also be added to this camera.

A couple of the other neat features that are new to Sony are the abilities to manually select which eye should be in focus (left, right, or auto) and also being able to hide focus areas in the menu that you never use.

One of the bigger autofocus developments with this camera is with the new Real-time Tracking for finding moving subjects and locking on to them. Real-time Tracking replaces what was previously labeled Lock-on AF in the camera's focus area menu. While Real-time Tracking is found in the focus area menu, it's not a specific area in itself. Within the Real-time Tracking setting, you can then choose which actual focus area to use it with (Zone, Wide, Flexible Spot, etc.) by tapping left or right.

There are three layers to Real-time Tracking and knowing them can help a little to make sense of what the camera is trying to do when its activated by tapping your subject on the screen. On the outer-most layer, the camera is going to use color, patterns, and distance to detect what should be in focus. Next, if it finds a face in the scene, it will begin to track that while simultaneously using the first layer to better hold on and also as a fallback should the face become obscured. The innermost layer of Real-time Tracking is attempting to pick up the eye on the face to really dial in the perfect focus. Now, for example, if something moves in front of the eye, the camera will still hold focus on the face, and when the face is blocked or looks away, the camera holds onto the color, pattern, and the distance it learned to stay as close to in-focus as it can.

On the a6400 paired with the 18-135mm, Real-time Tracking is mostly just OK. I found it to be easily fooled with more than one moving subject, or not sticky enough for a fast moving subject, or puzzled as to what the subject I selected was if the lighting wasn't super great. I had all three of these taking photos of a rainy outdoor basketball game and the camera couldn't keep up with tracking the players I wanted. Indoors under studio lights with two sword fighters also had problems. When things were simplified and I was photographing a single person just walking or posing, Tracking showed it does know what it's doing, but in those scenarios having the mode obviously isn't very important. I should mention that I only had very limited opportunities to use the feature, so I'm sure there's some middle ground out there where having Real-time Tracking in the a6400 would be helpful.

Sony said the tracking and subject recognition performance is a product of the camera and lens combination (Real-time Tracking will also be rolling out to their more superior a7 III, a7R III, and a9 cameras), so the a6400 is likely to be bottom of the barrel as far as execution, plus remember I'm using a kit lens rather than one of their better spec'd glass.

I only used manual focus in one situation with the Sony a6400, but I think it might be important to make note of since I know some people like adapting older lenses to E-mount cameras and sometimes manual focus is the only option. In my situation I was trying to photograph a bird in an open field and autofocus wouldn't be able to pick out a brown bird moving among the equally tall brown foliage. My best shot is below, but unfortunately it's still out of focus. I think the pixels in the viewfinder were too big and the focus assist zoom too low quality to be able to accurately determine if I had focus or not. At the time of shooting I thought I had probably gotten close enough to where the distance and depth of field would take care of the imprecision, but it looks like I was wrong.

Sony claims that improvements to video in the a6400 include smoother and more accurate autofocus. While shooting 4K video the screen does not dim as it did with previous models. There's touch to focus in video mode, and now Real-time Tracking enabled by tapping the subject as well.

Sony said that Real-time Tracking for video, like any other camera mode or setting, shouldn't be set there and forgotten about. Where Sony thinks Real-time Tracking is most valuable for video is when the camera operator can't easily access the controls while in use, such as while filming yourself in front of the camera or using a gimbal.

A few downsides to shooting video with the a6400 include a really annoying record button placement on the edge of the right backside grip, a slight crop while recording 4K at 30 fps and 1080p at 120 fps, and having no headphone output to monitor sound.

The video below shows miscellaneous sample footage shot with the Sony a6400 and 18-135mm lens. All clips shot in 4K 100 Mbps, 24 fps. Autofocus enabled on the camera (generally used Wide AF or Tracking AF) and Optical SteadyShot enabled on the lens.

As you see, having no in-body image stabilization and only the weak OSS in the lens putting in work, the footage is quite jittery even when I'm just standing in one spot. The clip where I'm walking is certainly unusable, and if I were to be filming myself walking for a vlog it would not look good at all. There's a clip in there that also exemplifies the heavy rolling shutter effect in the a6400.

One new feature in the a6400 is a time-lapse mode. The options available to configure are the start delay time, shooting interval time, number of shots, AE tracking sensitivity, and a silent shooting toggle. At the bottom of the menu screen it displays the total shooting time required based on selections. Once the time-lapse recording begins, it can be stopped at any point so it might make sense to set the number of photos taken way higher than you need and just manually stop once you think you got what you need. The images shot for the time-lapse are outputted as regular raw photos on your memory card, with no video file created in-camera. Videos need to be created on the computer either with Sony's free Imaging Edge software or with the third-party editor of your choice. On the camera, however, you can view a sample video and you can even adjust the playback speed of the time-lapse shown.

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