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Forbes
20-05-2025
- Forbes
Evaluating The Sony FE 400-800mm F/6.3-8 G OSS Lens
One of my biggest passions outside of technology is photography, so I'm very lucky to have the opportunity to evaluate cameras and lenses as part of my job. The Sony FE 400-800mm f/6.3 lens is a newcomer to the Sony lineup and offers one of the widest telephoto zoom ranges. This matches the 200-600mm model that was previously the company's deepest zoom lens, but topped out at 600mm. Sony also offers 400mm f/2.8 and 600mm f/4 lenses, but they retail for $12,000 and $13,000, respectively, and are meant primarily for high-end sports photography. Don't get me wrong, I would love to get my hands on one. But they're 'unobtanium' for most hobbyist photographers, since the lens probably costs more than all the other camera gear — including camera bodies — that most photographers own. The Sony FE 400-800mm f/6.3-8 G OSS lens Anshel Sag This Sony lens is unique because it offers a broad range of telephoto zoom without requiring the lens to expand. The FE 400-800mm lens is also undoubtedly the largest lens I've ever shot with, although nothing that a monopod or tripod can't help with. (More on that in a minute.) As shown in the photo below, it is roughly double the size of my Sony FE 70-200mm f/4 GM — my primary telephoto zoom lens — so if I used it all the time, it would likely require an entirely new camera bag configuration, or possibly even a new bag. As much as I like my FE 70-200mm, which has served me exceptionally well, it doesn't quite have the reach that I need in some scenarios. While I have previously used Sony 200-600mm and 100-400mm lenses to fill that gap, my use cases for them have been narrow enough that I generally have stuck to renting those lenses rather than buying them. Based on all of this, I was eager to try the FE 400-800mm lens. The Sony FE 400-800mm next to my FE 70-200 lens Anshel Sag Although this lens can have many applications, it is mainly intended for nature photography and some sports. As I'll explain below, I also had the opportunity to shoot an eclipse with it, although I probably chose the wrong camera body for that task. For the most part, I used this lens with my Sony A7RV camera body. There's simply no getting around how massive this lens is. That said, it isn't as heavy as it looks, but even if you have strong arms, I'd recommend a monopod or a tripod. A monopod is easier because you can make small adjustments without needing to fully reset everything like you would with a tripod. Not shooting with a monopod will likely result in more shots that are blurry, not to mention sore arms and shoulders. Plus, a lightweight monopod shouldn't take up much space or add much weight in your camera bag. With this lens, I also recommend shooting in better lighting conditions and using higher shutter speeds to get sharper images. I found that most of my blurry images came about when the sensor was not getting enough light, which told me I needed to shoot at a higher ISO. The best shots were all around 1/100 of a second or faster. The depth of field on some of the shots for subjects that were closer to me was fabulous; they looked like I was shooting with a much lower aperture than f/6.3 and created a significant bokeh effect. This was especially apparent with the flamingoes at the San Diego Zoo. The image below is incredibly sharp and took advantage of the full 60 MP of the A7RV, showing each feather hair and drop of water. A close-up shot of a flamingo at the San Diego Zoo Anshel Sag Before I went to the Zoo, I also tested the lens at a local airfield to see how it would work for plane spotting, and it was fantastic. The zoom range really gave me a lot of choices for how I wanted to frame the shot and how much of the surrounding environment I wanted to include. These were smaller planes, but the same could be done with larger aircraft from farther away. I also took the plane photos to help me learn how to shoot with the camera and home in on some of its quirks before I went to shoot wildlife in La Jolla at the Cove. Shooting planes was definitely easier than shooting wildlife, especially since birds and seals move very quickly and are not always in the best lighting. Even so, I did get some great shots of the wildlife in La Jolla before I headed to the Zoo a few days later. Since these animals are highly protected, having such a supertelephoto zoom lens was very useful as I kept my distance, and I was able to get shots that I otherwise couldn't have without that amount of zoom. Lots of the best wildlife photographers shoot with crazy-long zoom lenses to avoid disturbing the animals they photograph. At the Zoo, it was a great day for animal photography, so I was able to capture photos of orangutans, tigers, gorillas, monkeys and hippos. I tried taking pictures of the tapirs, but because they were all-black, my camera had difficulty focusing on them while they were moving. A colobus monkey from the San Diego Zoo Anshel Sag FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder The gorillas mainly were sleeping, so they were easier to photograph, but the best angles of them were through glass, and it was the same story with the orangutans. Thanks to the resolution of the A7RV, cropping some of these shots was a breeze, and I didn't feel like I lost much in terms of quality thanks to the lens and body combination. A sleeping gorilla at the San Diego Zoo Anshel Sag I was lucky enough that a lunar eclipse fell during the two-week period when I had the lens for evaluation. The eclipse happened on a miserable night in San Diego, when it was surprisingly cold, windy, cloudy and rainy. While I caught only a couple of drops of rain, I unfortunately had to battle with the wind and clouds quite a bit, so I struggled to get good low-light photos with the FE 400-800mm lens paired with my A7RV. This is where I believe I made a mistake and should've used my A7III, which is much better at low-light photography but also has much lower resolution. Considering I had 800mm of telephoto zoom to play with, I shouldn't have been concerned about cropping or resolution. Using the A7RV, I had to take longer exposures, which came out blurry because of either the camera shaking from the wind or the moon's own movement. (You can take a maximum of a 1-second shot before the moon moves enough to create blur.) I found that my biggest enemy with this lens was the wind; because of its size, the lens would act like a sail and catch the wind, which resulted in blurry images. That said, I did manage to capture a few shots with decent sharpness that I was happy to share — like the one below. The Sony FE 400-800mm f/6.3-8 G OSS is an excellent lens for Sony's E-Mount camera system and complements the capabilities of many of its camera bodies. It certainly helps to achieve shots that are impossible on a smartphone; I believe this is where the makers of many of these interchangeable-lens mirrorless camera systems should concentrate to attract avid photographers who want better photos than a smartphone will allow. While this lens costs $2,899, it also offers a zoom experience that's not possible with many other lenses worldwide, especially not for Sony's E-mount ecosystem. If you want an even broader zoom lens range, Canon does offer a 200-800 f/6.3-9 IS USM lens; meanwhile, Sigma offers an APO 300-800 f/5, but that lens is only for Nikon's old F-mount system. Currently, Nikon itself doesn't offer a zoom supertelephoto lens for its Z-mount system, only fixed-focal-length lenses at 400mm, 600mm and 800mm. With this lens, Sony offers an excellent option for the niche photographer who needs to get that extra zoom in well-lit scenarios such as sports, nature or other outdoor photography like plane spotting. However, I can't say that I would recommend it for astrophotography or any low-light photography unless you also have a low-light camera like the A7III or A7IV. The price is a bit steep at $2,899, yet there is apparently quite a market for this lens — they are sold out everywhere. It seems clear that Sony has found a sweet spot in the market and is satisfying a need for big zoom lenses among full-frame Sony mirrorless users.
WIRED
20-03-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Satellite Internet Will Let Us Put AI in Everything
AI-powered agents need to be connected all the time to be truly effective. Sounds like a job for satellite internet providers. A Starlink satellite dish on the roof of a house in Niamey, Niger on January 22, 2025. Photograph:If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our journalism. Learn more. Please also consider subscribing to WIRED Satellite internet is blasting off right now. Nations and states are inking deals with satellite providers to fill in service gaps for their residents and keep their critical infrastructure connected. Phone makers are building satellite capabilities into their handsets. Airlines are partnering with satellite operators to keep your in-flight Netflix stream stutter-free. And the race to blast the satellites powering these networks into orbit is helping the rocket business thrive. All of this adds up to boom times for satellite internet. But there's another factor that could cause the tech's proliferation to accelerate further: artificial intelligence. The AI industry is keen to see a fully connected world because of the benefits a persistent connection can bring to its products, says Anshel Sag, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy. The near future of the AI arms race hinges on agents, smart-ish virtual assistants that can automate various parts of your life. But those AI agents have to be on call 24/7 to be effective, which requires an always-on internet connection. And the fast pace of AI agent innovation requires the AI models to be tweaked and updated often, which makes a direct connection indispensable. 'We're still very much dependent on the cloud because things are changing so fast,' Sag says. 'You can't just deploy an AI model to an endpoint and expect that you're not going to have to update that model pretty regularly.' Another beneficiary of the satellite internet expansion is likely to be the great, flawed landscape that is the internet of things. IoT tech like free-roaming robot vacuums, road-tripping luggage trackers, and security cameras at the edge of your property will no longer struggle to stay connected while they transfer videos, photos, commands, and location data. 'I think IoT will become more relevant,' Sag says, 'because satellite connectivity will enable more IoT devices to feed back into AI.' If you have satellites blanketing the entire planet giving real-time data of where devices are and how they're moving, that offers up a massive feast of information for AI to gobble up and, hopefully, to digest into something usable. 'IoT struggled significantly because nobody knew what to do with the data,' Sag says of the past decade. 'But AI loves data. And the more data you give it, the more you can empower it to make better decisions.' A Link to the Stars Of all the major players in satellite internet, Starlink looms the largest. It provides solid internet service to over 4.5 million subscribers around the world, many of whom would otherwise not have access to a reliable connection. It's also a subsidiary of SpaceX and controlled by CEO Elon Musk, the person leading the systematic dismemberment of federal agencies across the entire pantheon of government in the US. Thanks to Musk, Starlink's internet service is even installed at the White House. That political connection is unsavory to some, and it's sending some potential customers elsewhere. Starlink is controversial for other reasons too: The service was found to be used by a criminal organization in Myanmar to keep a slavery-powerd scam operation online. But Starlink is beloved by millions of rural residents and rich yacht owners alike. The US military is excited about using it to keep troops connected in the field. Corporations are hitching their wagon to Starlink as well, with travel providers like United Airlines and cruise ship companies hoping to keep customers online as they scurry around the globe. T-Mobile recently partnered with Starlink to provide connectivity to customers in reception dead zones. Starlink on T-Mobile, Sag says, is an example of this satellite technology being implemented in a simple and effective way. If you go out of the range of a terrestrial T-Mobile reception tower, your phone can connect to Starlink passively, without having to fiddle with changing networks yourself. 'They worked extremely closely with Google and Apple to make sure that this was a super, super easy experience,' Sag says. 'You don't need an app and you don't have to click any buttons. It just works.' Terrestrial wireless connections already have that sort of interoperability built in. If you're traveling and lose connection with a cell tower, there's probably another one close by that your device will automatically connect to. Satellite internet provides that same unbroken experience even when there are no cell towers to connect to—for phones, trackers, and a litany of connected gadgets. Got You Covered Of course, Starlink's satellites are not the only ones on the launchpad. The same day T-Mobile first announced its partnership with Starlink, the European Commission also announced it had signed a contract to put a constellation of 290 satellites into orbit as part of its own Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²) program. Amazon's Project Kuiper already has prototypes in the sky, and is aiming to get more than 3,000 satellites into orbit to provide broadband internet service. Google's parent company, Alphabet, has spun off its own satellite provider named Taara to better compete in the field. Three Chinese firms have joined the fray, which also includes players like Lynk Global and Eutelsat OneWeb. AT&T and Verizon are both working with the Texas satellite company AST Space Mobile to expand their coverage areas. (Verizon has also been working with Project Kuiper since 2021.) Apple has invested $1.5 billion into the satellite company Globalstar with the goal of building out its own constellation that can enable Apple devices to use features like Emergency SOS and car crash detection in remote areas without a cell signal. 'The advantage of these global constellations and why we're building them is that they have global coverage,' says Ian Christensen, senior director of private sector programs at the Secure World Foundation, an organization that advocates for cooperative and sustainable space tech. 'You don't worry about being in a place where you connect with a Starlink satellite, but not a Globalstar satellite.' The way that ease of interoperability could go awry, Christensen cautions, is if devices themselves are locked to proprietary satellite systems. So if Globalstar satellites only worked on Apple phones or vice versa, there could be some gaps in the constellation of coverage. That doesn't seem like the plan for the companies involved, however. A more likely evolution of this globe-spanning network, Christensen says, is that satellites become platform-agnostic, much the way land-based telecom operations are. 'Most of your devices actually can talk to the Russian system, the Chinese system, and the US system,' Christensen says. 'Devices are interoperable in that way, and that's a design choice.' Partly Cloudy Skies Lots of experts, Christensen included, have concerns with the sustainability of satellite operations. In August 2024, the advocacy group PIRG called on the FCC to limit how many satellites are launched into orbit until a comprehensive environmental review can detail the widespread effects of blasting thousands of satellites into the sky. There's also the matter that satellite internet is typically slower than the speeds we're used to with fiber-based broadband. While the data rate might be sufficient for our connectivity needs now, it might get bogged down as the number of connected devices grows—especially if those devices are as data-hungry as an always-connected AI agent. Regardless, the race for low-Earth orbit is well underway. And your phone will be plugged into the space internet sooner than you think. 'Fundamentally, I think it will become standardized that all phones have satellite connectivity, because the value of saving a life is literally priceless,' Sag says. 'I wouldn't want to go out into a place where I don't have service without it.'
