Sony 200-600/5.6-6.3 OSS G - First Impressions

Another example...before the first bounce, about 25' from a standing start!

How fast is that? Many years ago a bunch of motorcyclists were tearing up the lawn at a state park near me. The police couldn't catch them on foot (obviously), and they wre gone before a patrol car could give chase. A big Harley can reach 30 mph in about 2 seconds, but a dog can do that in half a second. One cyclist got about 40 feet before being knocked to the ground. The others never showed up again. I heard it from the canine officer.

Eye detection was used for this photo.

My 200-600 became a working lens for the first time last weekend. I used it to record video of a concert by a local music conservatory. In this setup, I used one camera for a wide shot of the entire ensemble, and the 200-600 as a moving camera to capture small groups and closeups, from a distance of about 80 feet. You see a photo of the setup I used earlier in this thread. I used the 200-600 with a Sony A7iii, and the other camera was a Sony FS5M2 with a Sony PZ 18-110/4.

I would have preferred to use manual focus, since auto focus sometimes wanders, or locks on to a different subject than you want. However I was not able to use the remote focus shown in the photo. Since the lens is focus-by-wire, there are not distance marks or hard stops. The remote focus only has a span of about 300 degrees, which was not enough considering the subject distance varied too much, and the DOF is paper thin. I found myself manually switching AF on and off throughout the concert.

For some reason, AF-C operates continuously in the Video mode, even when you're not shooting. The AF button has no effect, and it ignores the DMF setting in the camera. At first glance, you must be all AF or all MF.

The Sony FS5 has an elegant solution. With the lens set to AF, the camera body can be set to AF/MF with a push-to-focus button when in MF mode. That way you can quickly focus on a subject and revert to MF once you release the button.

Unfortunately, Sony neglects to offer this feature on their FF still cameras. However, there is an undocumented hack, which I learned from the website below. With the lens switch set to AF, use the menu to select MF in the camera itself. Assign "AF/MF Control Hold" to one of the buttons. The "AES" button made sense, because I don't really use it otherwise. When you press the AES button, the camera changes to AF, then back to MF when you release the button, holding the last focal point. Voila!

This option may be limited to model 3 cameras and the A9. I recall with the A7ii and A7Rii that the menu MF option was dimmed out when there was a physical switch on the lens itself. The option only worked when the lens had no switch.