Sony A-Mount vs. E-Mount

The difference between the lenses

Continuing the theme of camera related news like the newly announced OLED EVF, comes a piece that’s worth the time of any Sony camera fan to watch — the difference between A-mount and E-mount lenses.

Ryan Mense from Fstoppers nails it with this:

One area where I see many people get confused is with Sony’s two distinct lines of A-mount and E-mount lenses. While NEX, FE, and E mount lenses are all made to fit interchangeably, the A mount is not compatible into that system without an adapter. I think what happens if that people assume the “A” is short for Alpha, and think since they own an “Alpha 7” camera the two should work together. The A-mount is in fact different, however, and made to be fitted onto Sony’s DSLR cameras.

This is something that to be honest, still gets me to this day and I have to think about from time to time. So in order to give you a better understanding of the two lens lineups, photographer Patrick Murphy-Racey put together an extensive video that breaks it all down.

This video tries to explain the difference between all the lenses that have been made to date for Sony still cameras: NEX 2010–2011, Sony E-mount from 2011- present, and A-Mount from 1985- present.

Ryan continues:

As mentioned in the video, one of the great things Sony did when laying out the design plans for their Alpha mirrorless cameras and lenses was they made APS-C and full-frame E-mounts identical so that they can be directly fitted on any Alpha mirrorless APS-C or full-frame camera. This means a full-frame lens like the FE 85mm f/1.4 GM can still mount directly to the APS-C a6500, and an APS-C lens like the brand new E 18–135mm f/3.5–5.6 OSS can be mounted directly to the full-frame a7R III camera. In the latter case, the camera will recognize an APS-C lens in mounted and automatically crop the image area down to the appropriate size where there will be no black edges (this drops down the amount of effective megapixels of your outputted images as well).

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