The Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5 G Master is Sony's answer to what a professional telephoto zoom should look like when price is no object. At roughly $4,300, it sits in a category where the competition is thinner and the stakes are much higher.
Coming to you from Christopher Frost, this detailed hands-on video covers the new Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5 G Master from front to back, including build quality, handling, autofocus performance, and full optical testing on the Sony a7CR. The constant f/4.5 aperture is the headline feature here. Most 100-400mm lenses darken to f/5.6 or f/6.3 at the long end, which is exactly where you tend to spend most of your time when shooting sports or wildlife. Frost also points out that this lens zooms internally, which keeps dust and moisture out of the mechanism over time and is something working professionals genuinely care about. It's a meaningful design difference, not just a marketing point.
The autofocus is driven by four XD linear motors, and Frost says Sony claims it's up to three times faster than the older Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 G Master OSS, with 50% better tracking. In continuous autofocus, Frost describes it as nearly instantaneous, and the bird-tracking footage he shows backs that up. The zoom ring has a loose/tight mode switch, which sounds like a small thing until you're trying to quickly zoom out to find a moving subject and back in to shoot. There's also a rear drop-in filter slot for 40.5mm filters, compatibility with Sony's 1.4x and 2x teleconverters, four customizable autofocus hold buttons, and a spring-loaded function ring that can be set for power focus, APS-C crop switching, or focus presets.
On the optical side, Frost runs the lens through sharpness, distortion, vignetting, flare, bokeh, and chromatic aberration tests on the 61-megapixel a7CR, which is about as demanding a sensor as you can put a lens in front of. Sharpness at 100mm and 250mm is strong across most of the frame wide open, with only mild corner softness at 400mm. Bokeh quality is a genuine standout, with clean specular highlights and impressively smooth rendering even against difficult backgrounds like foliage. The only real weakness Frost identifies is longitudinal chromatic aberration at f/4.5, which clears up by f/8. The video also covers close-focus performance, flare behavior, and what happens to distortion and vignetting when in-camera corrections are disabled, which is worth watching if you shoot raw and care about what the lens actually does optically.
Check out the video above for the full breakdown from Frost, including the complete image quality comparisons and his final verdict.
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