Is this the best budget lens for video on the Sony A7iii?

by Robb Sutton

This past weekend, my wife and I decided to cook some lasagna from scratch. And when I mean from scratch…I mean I picked up 25 pounds of tomatoes to start the sauce with. We started at about 9:30am and finished up right at our planned 6:30pm dinner time. It was a blast and even though the lasagna didn’t look awesome at the end…it tasted a lot better than it looked.

I thought it would be a great time to try out the Sony A7iii with the “nifty fifty” Sony 50mm/f1.8 lens to film the process. Since I really didn’t need any audio – I decided to go with the 1080p / 120fps setting to capture everything in slow motion figuring I could just speed up sections later in post if I wanted to. That setting did give me the slow motion effect I was looking for on most shots.

Sony A7iii / Best budget video lens the 50mm/f1.8?

The answer to this isn’t an easy one but I do believe it is for several reasons. The 50mm/f1.8 from Sony is really small and crazy light. In comparison to my last 50mm setup for video – the Canon 5D Mark III and the Sigma 50mm/f1.4 – it is probably a third of the weight and size…if not more. That makes it much easier to get into tight spaces and it makes you want to shoot more often since it isn’t a huge weight to carry around.

The Sony 50mm/f1.8 also focuses decently fast which makes it so that changing scenes and moving objects are almost always caught in focus with the excellent auto-focus out of the Sony A7iii. The only issue you really run into (which wasn’t an issue for this video) is that the focus motor on the 50mm is not silent. I don’t imagine this being a problem in noisy areas or if you are using a boom mic like the Rode, but if you are planning on trying to capture audio through the internal mics…it could end up being a problem.

At $200…it’s a steal for video or photography in my opinion. It really allows you to separate the subject from the background and it is light enough to take in a lot of different situations. Take a look at the video above and let me know what you guys think.

Sony A7iii – https://amzn.to/2rq6jBF / Sony 50mm f1.8 – https://amzn.to/2KGnJ53

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