I’ve been very happy with my Sony A7 IV camera since I bought it a few years ago. It does everything I need it to do and I’m not sure what would tempt me to trade it in. So, I haven’t bought any photo gear in quite a while. But recently a new lens has tempted me. But it’s a long story (and thus the reason it’s a post). About fourteen years ago I bought the Sony (badged as Carl Zeiss) A-mount 135mm, f\1.8 lens. It was an extremely extravagant purchase at $1,500 and I couldn’t justify it in use terms because basically it was a very long portrait lens for which I had very rare need. But after seeing some of the extraordinary results it could produce, I plunked down the cash. And it was every bit as sharp and contrasty as the critics claimed. And I managed to find quite a few excuses to drag this big heavy lens with me to places and events where longer and shorter and lighter lenses make better sense.
But not too long after this purchase, Sony, in its infinite cruelty, stopped making A-mount cameras and went mirrorless. I won’t repeat my long sad story of enduring the e-mount introduction. But I will mention that Sony salved over the initial problem of having no lenses for their new mirrorless cameras by producing a line of attachments for adapting A-mount lenses to e-mount cameras. They were designated with the prefix LA-EA and numbered successively 1 through 5. And with each introduction I dreamed of my e-mount cameras working with my A-mount lenses as if they were native lenses. Well, that never happened. Granted they got better. But even the LA-EA-5 never allowed my A-mount lenses to enjoy the full capability of the camera’s auto-focus or special features like magnified view, in the same way as my e-mount lenses could.
And so, one by one I sold off my A-mount lenses and mostly bought the e-mount equivalent lenses (or just didn’t replace them). But not the 135mm f\1.8. By the time the equivalent e-mount lens appeared my A-mount lens was no longer very marketable. A-mount lenses had a fairly small pool of users and so the market prices sank to fairly low prices. And when the new lens came out in e-mount they wanted $2,100. And that seemed a bridge too far for a lens that wasn’t really needed for a major part of my shooting style.
Over the years third party manufacturers have come out with their versions of this lens in the e-mount. First Sigma, then Samyang and now Viltrox. Each time I looked at the combination of price savings and quality and I shrugged my shoulders and said meh. But finally, it’s reached the breaking point. A review of the Viltrox lens (actually several reviews) claim that it is very slightly better than Sony’s $2,100 version but at about 1/3 the price ($760). So, I checked the trade in value of my old A-mount lens and finding it to be about $350 I mailed it out and now await my thirty pieces of silver (figuratively) before finishing off the transaction to buy the Viltrox.
Wrapping up the lens gave me a pang of regret. It was a beautiful piece of kit that had worked flawlessly when attached to the camera it was designed for, the Sony A-850 DSLR. It wasn’t the lens’s fault that the geniuses at Sony had almost simultaneously with buying the Minolta camera line, relegated all of its products to obsolescence by going mirrorless. But such is life.
Well onward and upward in 2025. I will record the arrival of the new lens with photos it produces. After all that’s the real reason they make these darn things.
