If you ask any photographer about their preferred lenses, or what lens you should start with as an enthusiast, most will respond with one lens length in particular. They will always tell you that you should get a 50mm lens. There is a good reason for that.

The 50mm prime lens is one of the most versatile lens you can find in your arsenal of lenses. In the right hands, it is an excellent portrait lens that is meant to capture everything from candid photos to magazine quality headshots. It is perfect for street photography, since 50mm is narrow enough for you to get portraits of people in their everyday lives without getting into their personal spaces. In open spaces, landscape photos can look good too. There is also the fact that they say that the frame you get with 50mm lenses is the closest to what you actually see with your own eyes. Whatever it is, you get the idea.

Sony already has two 50mm lenses in their stables. They have the SEL50F25G lens. It is a rather compact, budget-friendly 50mm lens with F2.5 aperture. It weighs only 174g and is only 45mm long.

They also have the super-premium FE 50mm F1.2 G Master lens that offers a lot of lens for three-folds the price of the 50mm G lens. It is not as compact at 108mm in length. It is also much heavier at 778g in weight. It offers F1.2 aperture though for beautiful bokeh. The F1.2 aperture means that it is amazingly fast and especially excellent video work. There are 11 aperture blades for smooth, round bokeh effects. The weight is also a direct contribution o the amount of glass elements within the lens, about 14 of them.

So why do Sony need to introduce another 50mm lens? Because the new Sony 50mm G Master lens is meant to be a modern take of what a 50mm lens is supposed to be.

In terms of minimum focus distance and magnification, it is similar to the older lens. The minimum focus distance is at 0.41m and autofocus allows the lens 0.16x magnification for beautiful and detailed close-up photos. These are not the improvements made on the new lens though.

It features a slightly smaller maximum lens opening than the existing lens at F1.4 vs F1.2. But that does not mean that it is not a fast lens, it is still faster than most 50mm lens you can find in the market. It also weighs quite a little bit less than the older lens at 516g, which also means you might get more use out of the lens in one sitting. At 96mm length, it is also slightly more compact than the other 50mm G Master lens.

How they got the lens to go on a diet is by fitting a new high-thrust XD (extreme dynamic) linear motors which is smaller than lighter than ever before. You still have 11 aperture blades, but they are new more compact units compared to before, so the lens can be made shorter than before.

The new linear motors are not just to reduce weight and make the lens smaller though. The XD Linear motors goes along with a new algorithm for smoother and more responsive focus control. That also means that your autofocus is faster than before. Thanks to smoother motors, the autofocus mechanism is also quieter than before. The faster, smoother operations means that it is perfect for shooting high frame-rate videos. To make it even better for videos, the lens offers focus breathing compensation to reduce the image distortion when the lens changes focus.

The new lens offers a Linear Response MF focus ring that directly responses to subtle controls when you work with it manually. There is also a new iris lock switch, first in a prime lens from Sony. There are now two custom programmable buttons on the lens. Sony has also coat the glass with a fluorine coating that is supposed to repel fingerprints, dust, water, oil, and other contaminants from the exposed glass elements to ensure that the lens is still as excellent as it can be in any shoot conditions.

The Sony FE 50mm F1.4 G master (SEL5014GM) lens will be available in Malaysia at the end of March 2023 onward. They have not mentioned the price for the lens just yet. The previous 50mm lens from Sony’s G Master line-up sets you back MYR 9,499. With that as an indication, you might want to ensure you have anywhere between MYR 8,000 to 10,000 to spare to get the upcoming lens. It is just an educated guess though; we could be wrong. More information on the Sony FE 50mm F1.4 G Master lens can be found on their website.