It has been about a year and a half since I picked up my Sony Sonnar T* FE 55mm 𝑓/1.8 ZA (goodness, what a name!), and I have decided: I just do not like it that much. I like the general focal length, but I rarely love the pictures that I get out of this lens. I consistently prefer — and so, consistently end up switching to — either my 35mm 𝑓/1.8 or my 85mm 𝑓/1.8. In theory, these lenses should perform very similarly, but in practice the quality of photo I get out of the 55mm is just subtly lesser. The bokeh is less nice, the sharpness is less crisp, the color is not quite as pleasant.

Where I wrote this on acquiring it — 

For portraits, it’s simply phenomenal. It feels like cheating.

 — I now feel kind of the opposite. Even looking at the images in the post where I said that, I feel about them as I do now about all the photos from this lens. They are: fine.

It is not that this is a bad lens. I think all the time about switching up to the corresponding 50mm lens. The contrast is stark: I never think “I should really save up so I can upgrade to the 𝑓/1.4 GM version of this” for the 35mm and 85mm lenses. Would I happily accept if someone gave me gifts of the same? Sure! I would love the extra stop, and even more I would love the clicked aperture ring on the lens itself. But with both of those lenses, I actually would think a bit about the tradeoff of the extra size and weight, whereas with the 50mm GM, I would switch in an instant. Never mind that it is over 80% heavier, an inch longer, and half an inch larger in diameter. (These are the same tradeoffs I called out in that first post, but I now think about them exactly the opposite as I did then. The tradeoff is more favorable now, though, because Sony has since released the 50mm 𝑓/1.4 GM; when I wrote that post they had only the much larger and heavier 𝑓/1.2 GM.) Because it is less a function of what the 50mm GM offers than what the 55mm Zeiss misses.

Those misses are subtle, small things that are hard to point to concrete examples of, but which net out to the difference between a lens that is really good and one that is merely fine. Pixel peeping will show you the significantly worse fringing I identified after my first week of use with the lens, and you can definitely analyze your way to the difference in the bokeh. The color weakness is harder to describe. But it is really the combination of all of them that makes this a lesser lens. Not a bad one. But the only one in my collection I am planning to replace.