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Sony now has four lenses that can get you to 600mm or beyond for birds, and two of them weigh around 1 kg while costing less than many full frame bodies. Once teleconverters come into play, those lenses overlap in focal length, so the choice comes down to how much weight, money, and light each route to the same reach will cost you.
At $2,698, the 400mm prime is the cheapest of the group by a wide margin, while the 300mm sits at $6,798. Jan Wegener compares the Sony FE 400mm f/4.5 GM OSS, the Sony FE 600mm f/6.3 GM OSS, the Sony FE 300mm f/2.8 GM OSS, and the Sony FE 100-400mm f/4.5 GM OSS after long stretches of shooting kingfishers, bee-eaters, kites, and plover chicks with them. Judged on bare lens image quality alone, he finds them almost impossible to separate. The 400mm and 600mm primes come in around 1 kg each, light enough to handhold all day. The 300mm is still compact and has the fastest aperture of the four. The zoom is noticeably bigger and heavier, and in exchange it lets you reframe without swapping glass.
Around 400mm, the choice gets more complicated. The 300mm needs a Sony FE 1.4x Teleconverter to reach 420mm, yet it still opens to f/4, a little faster than the f/4.5 on both native 400mm options. That pairing also focuses down to 2 m (6.6 ft), while the 400mm prime stops at 2.5 m (8.2 ft). It costs $7,396, though, nearly three times the price of the 400mm. The zoom beats both on close focus at 1.5 m (4.9 ft) and delivers the largest magnification of the three. For birds in flight, Wegener points out that zooming out to find the subject and then back in to frame it can make tracking much easier.
Light, slower super telephotos have become a pattern across the industry. Canon's RF 600mm f/11 and RF 800mm f/11 showed in 2020 that plenty of people would trade aperture for a lens they could actually carry. Nikon followed with the Z 400mm f/4.5 VR S and the Z 600mm f/6.3 VR S, the latter using a phase Fresnel element to keep its size down. Two things make those slower apertures easier to live with now. Current sensors stay clean at higher ISOs than they did a decade ago, and AI noise reduction such as Lightroom's Denoise, introduced in 2023, recovers files that once would have gone in the trash. The teleconverter math is easy to keep in your head in the field. A 1.4x costs you one stop, and a 2x costs you two. If you're shooting at 1/2,000 s and ISO 1,600 on a bare f/6.3 lens, adding a 1.4x puts you at f/9, so you'll need ISO 3,200 to hold the same shutter speed. A 2x takes you to f/13 and ISO 6,400. Run those numbers before you head out, and you'll know whether a given combination will actually freeze a bird in the light you usually get.
Most of the hard decisions land around 600mm. Put the 1.4x on the 400mm prime and you get 560mm at f/6.3, the same maximum aperture as the bare 600mm, for $400 less. Side by side, Wegener finds it hard to see much difference in the images, although the 600mm gives a slightly larger bird and a smoother background, and autofocus on the converted 400mm lags a little behind the bare lens. The 300mm with a Sony FE 2x Teleconverter reaches 600mm at f/5.6, the fastest option in this range. With that pairing and a Sony a9 III, he photographed azure kingfishers in flight in low light at ISO 12,800. Buying the 300mm plus both converters runs more than $8,000, more than double the price of the 600mm. The zoom with a 1.4x also lands at 560mm and f/6.3, and it gives up its f/4.5 advantage to get there. Wegener compares that combination to the Sony FE 200-600mm f/5.6-6.3 G OSS, which reaches 600mm at f/6.3 with no converter and at a much lower price.
You can see how the 800mm and 1,200mm setups hold up, along with Wegener's notes on stabilization and the pair of lenses he'd put in his own bag, in the video above.
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