Your cart is empty.
Your cart is empty.Product Description
Super wide-angle zoom lenses are ideal for taking photos of sweeping landscapes and producing striking images with emphasized perspective. For mid- to high-level users who seek a wider minimum focal length than offered by standard wideangle zoom lenses, the SEL-1018 is the ideal choice. NOTE:"35 mm equivalent focal length (APS-C)" and "Angle of View (APS-C)" are with interchangeable lens digital camera incorporating APS-C type image sensors. This super wide-angle zoom lens is perfect for taking photos of sweeping landscapes and producing striking images with emphasized perspective. Features incluse a constant maximum aperture of F4 and built-in Optical SteadyShot (OSS) image stabilization. When changing your aperture to defocus the background, the light sources appear blurred. This ‘bokeh’ effect of the blurred background can be enhanced with circular aperture blades used in this lens. Conventional aperture blades have flat sides creating unappealing polygonal shaped defocussed points of light. α lenses overcome this problem through a unique design that keeps the aperture almost perfectly circular from its wide-open setting to when it is closed by 2 stops. Smoother, more natural defocusing can be obtained as a result. As focal lengths get longer, lenses built with conventional optical glass have difficulties with chromatic aberration, and as a result images suffer from lower contrast, lower color quality, and lower resolution. ED glass dramatically reduces chromatic aberration at telephoto ranges, and provides superior contrast across the entire image, even at large aperture settings. Super ED glass provides enhanced compensation for chromatic aberration. Aspherical lens design dramatically reduces spherical aberration while also reducing lens size and weight. Spherical aberration is a slight misalignment of the light rays projected on the image plane. This is caused by differences in refraction at different points on conventional spherical lenses which degrade image quality in large-aperture lenses. Specially shaped “aspherical” elements near the diaphragm restore alignment of light rays at the image plane, maintaining high sharpness and contrast even at maximum aperture and can also be used at other points in the optical path to reduce distortion. Well-designed aspherical elements can reduce the total number of elements required in the lens, thus reducing overall size and weight. Advanced Aspherical (AA) elements are an evolved variant, featuring an extremely high thickness ratio between the center and periphery. AA elements are exceedingly difficult to produce, relying on the most advanced molding technology to consistently and precisely achieve the required shape and surface accuracy, resulting in significantly improved image accuracy and quality. The distance encoder plays an integral part in ADI flash metering, which delivers high precision flash metering that is unaffected by the reflectance of subjects or backgrounds. The distance encoder is a lens component that directly detects the position of the focusing mechanism, and sends a signal to the CPU in order to measure distance to the subject. During flash photography, this data is very useful in calculating how much flash output is appropriate to the scene. Gyro sensors built into the lens detect even the slightest movement, and the stabilization lens is precisely shifted to counteract any image blur that might occur. The use of precision, quiet linear motors and technology inherited from high-end Sony professional camcorders results in exceptionally quiet, effective image stabilization that contributes to high-quality movies as well as stills. Only the middle groups of the optical system move to achieve focus, so the overall length of the lens does not change. Other important benefits include fast autofocusing and a short minimum focusing distance. Also, the filter thread at the front of the lens does not rotate, which is convenient if you’re using a polarizing filter. 2012 Sony Electronics All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony is not responsible for typographical and photographic errors. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice. Sony, BIONZ, BRAVIA, Exmor, InfoLITHIUM, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo, PlayMemories Home, Smile Shutter, Stamina, Theatre Sync, Sweep Panorama, and the Sony make.believe logo are trademarks of Sony. AVCHD is a trademark of Panasonic Corporation and Sony Corporation. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Vista are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Mac OS and iMovie are trademarks of Apple Computers, HDMI is a trademark of HDMI Licensing . All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.
From the Manufacturer
10-18mm f/4 Wide-Angle Zoom Lens
This super wide-angle zoom lens is perfect for taking photos of sweeping landscapes and producing striking images with emphasized perspective. Features incluse a constant maximum aperture of F4 and built-in Optical SteadyShot (OSS) image stabilization.
Technology
Circular Aperture
When changing your aperture to defocus the background, the light sources appear blurred. This ‘bokeh’ effect of the blurred background can be enhanced with circular aperture blades used in this lens. Conventional aperture blades have flat sides creating unappealing polygonal shaped defocussed points of light. α lenses overcome this problem through a unique design that keeps the aperture almost perfectly circular from its wide-open setting to when it is closed by 2 stops. Smoother, more natural defocusing can be obtained as a result.
ED (Extra-low Dispersion) glass
As focal lengths get longer, lenses built with conventional optical glass have difficulties with chromatic aberration, and as a result images suffer from lower contrast, lower color quality, and lower resolution. ED glass dramatically reduces chromatic aberration at telephoto ranges, and provides superior contrast across the entire image, even at large aperture settings. Super ED glass provides enhanced compensation for chromatic aberration.
Aspherical lens elements
Aspherical lens design dramatically reduces spherical aberration while also reducing lens size and weight. Spherical aberration is a slight misalignment of the light rays projected on the image plane. This is caused by differences in refraction at different points on conventional spherical lenses which degrade image quality in large-aperture lenses. Specially shaped “aspherical” elements near the diaphragm restore alignment of light rays at the image plane, maintaining high sharpness and contrast even at maximum aperture and can also be used at other points in the optical path to reduce distortion. Well-designed aspherical elements can reduce the total number of elements required in the lens, thus reducing overall size and weight. Advanced Aspherical (AA) elements are an evolved variant, featuring an extremely high thickness ratio between the center and periphery. AA elements are exceedingly difficult to produce, relying on the most advanced molding technology to consistently and precisely achieve the required shape and surface accuracy, resulting in significantly improved image accuracy and quality.
Distance encoder
The distance encoder plays an integral part in ADI flash metering, which delivers high precision flash metering that is unaffected by the reflectance of subjects or backgrounds. The distance encoder is a lens component that directly detects the position of the focusing mechanism, and sends a signal to the CPU in order to measure distance to the subject. During flash photography, this data is very useful in calculating how much flash output is appropriate to the scene.
Lens-based optical image stabilization
Gyro sensors built into the lens detect even the slightest movement, and the stabilization lens is precisely shifted to counteract any image blur that might occur. The use of precision, quiet linear motors and technology inherited from high-end Sony professional camcorders results in exceptionally quiet, effective image stabilization that contributes to high-quality movies as well as stills.
Additional Features
Internal focusing
Only the middle groups of the optical system move to achieve focus, so the overall length of the lens does not change. Other important benefits include fast autofocusing and a short minimum focusing distance. Also, the filter thread at the front of the lens does not rotate, which is convenient if you’re using a polarizing filter.
2012 Sony Electronics Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. Sony is not responsible for typographical and photographic errors. Features and specifications are subject to change without notice.
Sony, BIONZ, BRAVIA, Exmor, InfoLITHIUM, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Duo, Memory Stick PRO Duo, Memory Stick PRO-HG Duo, PlayMemories Home, Smile Shutter, Stamina, Theatre Sync, Sweep Panorama, and the Sony make.believe logo are trademarks of Sony. AVCHD is a trademark of Panasonic Corporation and Sony Corporation. Microsoft, Windows, and Windows Vista are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Mac OS and iMovie are trademarks of Apple Computers, Inc. HDMI is a trademark of HDMI Licensing LLC. All other trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners.
Phil
Reviewed in the United States on February 13, 2025
I love this lens! I am using it on a Sony a6000 mirrorless SLR. The 10 mm wide-angle perspective creates some wonderful images. The other end of its focal length, 18 mm, picks up where my standard 18 to 55 mm lens leaves off. This is the most distortion-free wide angle I have owned. It is not inexpensive, but it is worth every penny. Indeed, I lost one on a vacation and promptly bought another. I have had a little trouble attaching and removing the lens shade, but it is my own fault for getting some sand in the mount. The sand is long gone, but it roughed up the mounting surfaces slightly.
Verified Purchaser
Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2024
This is a great lens. Clear with little to no visible distortion. I love its compact size and it's so light. I also bought this one used and it's in great condition.
Ash Azrin
Reviewed in Singapore on September 10, 2020
I was looking for a wide angle lens until I saw this lens. This lens is awesome if you like to photograph wide vistas. Pretty sharp too. Colors are nice. Lightweight and compact. Absolutely love it.
Souleymane
Reviewed in Canada on August 29, 2019
Amazing for vlogging, video & real estste photography. Comes with hood lens unlike canon lenses which is nice to see.
Reviewer
Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2019
I enjoy this lens as a versatile wide-angle tool to go with my A6400. It focuses quickly and exhibit decent corner-to-corner sharpness slightly stopped down. It feels solid in construction, with a metal skin over what I assume is a plastic frame. I find the stabilization quite useful, as you're not always taking pictures from a steady tripod - planes, trains, and automobiles! The stabilization also helps with low light shooting, where a slower shutter speed can be used to lower your ISO.The big downside of this lens is price. While its price seems to fluctuate within a $200 band, this lens is very expensive for an ultrawide APS-C lens. Other brands offer excellent crop sensor ultrawides for half or a third of the price. For this much, you would expect Sony to weather seal the lens, but no...Sony refuses to add weather resistance to their APS-C lenses regardless of the price. Also, while this lens is marginally brighter than those cheap peers (which are usually F4-5.6), you can get F2 or brighter ultrawide primes - often for a tiny fraction of what Sony charges for the lens.Overall this is an excellent travel and ultrawide lens - if you're willing to pay for it.
McCarthy
Reviewed in Canada on November 24, 2018
Awesome lens
41Danny1
Reviewed in Canada on September 1, 2017
Great lens! It's a little expensive for a non-professional, but totally worth it if your hobby means that much to you. It has a fairly compact form factor, it's not point-and-shoot kind of small; but definitely lightweight enough to travel with ease. The image is sharp and the wide angle is great for people who like to film themselves (vloggers and YouTubers,) or for those who just like taking selfies! This is the ultimate Sony APSC E-mount lens for that. Just bear in mind, since it is a wide angle lens and has a maximum aperture of f/4.0, this lens isn't going to be amazing at taking product shots or anything of the like.I've been using this lens for about a couple of months now, and I am very happy with this purchase.
Bob
Reviewed in the United States on April 27, 2014
I've owned four of Sony's 'Nex' camera so far, the Nex-5n, the Nex-7, the Nex-6, and recently the ILCE-6000. I truly enjoy the smaller foot print, the live view on the LCD screen as well as the view finder, and the fact that I can nurture my toy addiction while working on my photography skills. I am not a professional photographer by any means, I started by taking pictures of my 4 kids and now I've continued to try and improve more by becoming more proficient and low-light photography indoors and outdoors.I'm not a pixel-peeper, so my review is not a technical one. The other lenses I own are the original SEL18200 (truly love that lens, but you need light for it to shine, and I feel for the range and quality you get it is priced appropriately), the Zeiss SEL2418 (which is an amazing lens, but arguable expensive), and now this SEL1018.What I have noticed is that the SEL1018 is the first lens that gives me the focal range I need for indoor shooting. For birthday parties, or when their are groups of people, I can get the whole group in the picture without having to push up against a wall. It is also very nice to have a range to zoom - it just makes framing things that much easier, especially when you are also interacting with people and don't want to take minutes to set up and compose a shot. The F4 aperture is not considered 'fast', but this lens has OSS and I find it fast enough for indoor shooting in moderate light. I waited a long time to buy this lens, primarily due to cost, but also because I had the SEL18200 which gave me the wide angle I thought was good enough and the 16mm Sony prime lens was out there and fairly inexpensive.I'm getting a very high number of 'keepers' with this lens, the shots produced are really very nice, the focal range is great for indoors and allows me to zoom to compose quickly, and the F4 aperture is good enough especially considering OSS.I should have bought this lens a long time ago.
Doctor.Generosity
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2012
Sony seems to have a well thought-out product strategy for their NEX series bodies, which are proving to be a big hit. But their lens strategy appears to be confusing. There is not a simple lens roadmap, but a mixture of lenses from different sources, some possibly designed inhouse by Sony, some with the Zeiss name (and inflated price premium for that name), and other lenses which appear to be made for Sony by specialty designers - producers. Most Sony NEX camera owners are not aware that Sony also makes a line of high end professional video cameras with the same sensor and e-mount lenses, which explains this in part. As a result Zeiss makes industrial quality cinema lenses in e-mount; $5k for the fixed focal lengths and $21K for the zooms. I bet those are cool.But for the consumer NEX cameras, we see a scattered, overlapped offering in their list of ultra-wide e-mount lenses. The first kit lens offered by Sony was a compact 16mm f2.8. Then Sony offered an Ultrawide converter attachment for this (VDL-ECU1) which has an effective focal length about 12.5mm. These two, when attached together, are actually quite good optically, for a total price about 300 bucks if you got the 16 in a kit. In addition, there is the Fisheye Converter (ECL-ECF1) in the same series which has a 180° field (distorted) for just 129 more dollars.Recently Sony came out with the 10-18 mm zoom, f4, with image stabilization, but quite expensive at $850; a completely different approach which almost certainly is designed and made by different people.Having all of these at hand, I performed a direct image quality comparison. To compare the 10-18mm zoom to the 16mm, I set both to f4. When I added the Ultrawide I matched the field of view by setting the zoom to 12.5mm. I didn't bother to compare the Fisheye to the 10-18 mm zoom because the latter cannot match its field of view.These were all JPEGs, not RAW. It is important to understand that modern lenses like both these Sony's are no longer just hunks of glass; they are designed to be used with the in-camera JPEG processing firmware, which undoes the inherent distortions found in most wide angle lenses, along with vignetting and chromatic aberration. For lens design, it is no longer so necessary to depend on the difficult correction of glass elements with additional glass elements, aspherics, etc., as has been the tradition for more than a hundred years. Lenses are now part software, and the manufacturers are all adopting this approach. The digital image processing can be observed directly on both these lenses when one is looking at the LCD image and then fires the shot - you'll watch as the replay image comes up, with the whole field visibly altered by software distortion correction. For this reason it would require a lot of skill and Photoshop time to do the same thing manually starting from the RAW images. The downside for users is that lenses can no longer be used on non-Sony cameras, even in manual mode with a mount adapter, because they will look terrible. But it's now a fact of life; JPEG's are the way these lenses are designed to be used, so that's how they should be evaluated.A summary of my tests of the image quality from the 10-18mm zoom vs. the 16mm (including the converter) is that they are roughly comparable. If one is very picky and studies the finest details, the 16mm has a bit more chromatic aberration but overall may be just slightly nicer than the zoom. Surprisingly, the 16mm+Ultrawide converter images are very good. To look at performance in the corners, I made extra shots which focussed in the far corner because the field of wide angle lenses is not flat. This showed that, at f4, the 10-18 zoom is superior to the 16 in the corners, but it was a moderate difference. If stopped down to f8, the difference is less.Which should you buy? Photographers on a budget should consider the "pancake" 16 mm plus the Ultrawide converter. Of course it's inconvenient to attach the converter if you are in a hurry, but the availability of the Fisheye is also a big plus and can't be matched by the 10-18 zoom. The 16 with two converters taken together constitute a rather brilliant and cost effective set and I don't know why Sony promotes them so little.The 10-18mm zoom is a fine lens and superior to the 16mm but only moderately so. It costs three times as much as the 16+converter and is physically much larger. However, it's more convenient and quicker; having a zoom allows one to frame shots and optimize the sensor area. Also image stabilization, unusual on an ultra-wide, more than offsets the one-stop smaller aperture, permitting slower shutter speeds, and is very much worth having.The 16 and 10-18 lenses are completely different designs - size, cost, convenience, operational quickness - but image quality is actually in roughly the same ballpark. If you can't decide, I recommend the 16mm plus the two converters. I put my NEX in movie mode with the Fisheye attached and walked around a party we were having, stopping for conversations and capturing the whole feel of the event - fantastic footage which would be difficult to record any other way.
Recommended Products
