I have just upgraded my camera from a Sony A200 up th the Sony A580 reason I kept with sont was maily due to accessories I have ie flash 4 lenses, battery grip etc. Plus I am impressed with the pic quality and ease of use.

My question is

The a580 cam with a Sony SAM lens 18 - 55 my a200 had a 18-70 lens on which i believe is a dt lens. the older lens appears to be made of sterner stuff and has a lonfer focal range. Do I keep the SAM lens or should I swap the two ? my telephoto lenses start at 70 and 80 if that helps any .

the 18-55 is usually a poor quality bundled kit lens well typically with canon cameras it is. it was the first thing i got rid of in exchange for a 17-85. on the canon stuff the image quality massively jumps when going from a kit lens up to a good after market lens.


this is massivly compressed uploaded to photobucket, took with both the camera and subject item hand held but you get the drift of what can be achieved with a good lens.



im not that informed when it comes to sony sony cameras being a canon user but if it were me i would be reading up on the camera forums and doing some like for like tests on a tripod in raw mode at different apertures and zooms.

Dpreview is usually a pretty good site for lens reviews. a quick look on there says that the new 18-55 outperforms the old 18-70, but i didnt read all of the review

http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/sonydslra380/page17.asp

I do have other lenses, my main query is which one of the 2 is the better lens the SAM or DT lens

well acording to the dp review the sam is a much better lens but at the end of the day go with the one you like. if you cant tell the difference between the two after taking a few pictures of the same thing with the different lenses then just keep the one you like.

Just done the exact same upgrade myself although mine is still in the post. I read quite a bit on the two different lens and the new 18-55mm is apparently much better in terms of image quality and have seen the shots to prove