theycallmefrench
Man, super disappointing. I shoot 40+ weddings a year. (Both photo and video) I was so giddy and excited opening this box when it arrived and couldnt wait to test it out based on what I have heard from most review sites. My old canon 50 1.4 is on its last leg after 4 years of abuse so I decided to check this one out. Overall, Id say this lens is a great performer MOST of the time. It is however far from perfect. These are my thoughts. •The images are beautiful from this lens, significantly less distortion then most and the color is fantastic. • Yes this lens is incredibly sharp but so are most 50s. The bokeh is very disappointing and just not pleasing in my opinion. • For a heavy and large lens like this (which I prefer) it still feels kind of cheap. The metal base is the highlight and is by far the best portion of the lens. The rest of the barrel, including the AF/MF switch and focus ring is made of some very cheap feeling plastic which seems like it would crack if I squeezed it hard enough. Even just putting a little pressure below the focus ring and I can feel the barrel give. One drop and this thing would be a goner. • The AF while obviously better than the extremely loud Tamrons and past Sigmas I have used is by no means quiet and is extremely jumpy. When shooting stills this lens (while pretty fast) will adjust about 6 times. You hear the barrel spin to the approximate distance and then "click,click,click,click,click,click." Very quickly, all of these micro adjustments while you are waiting for the shutter to release. This wouldnt be such a big deal if it nailed the focus every shot. But it does not.(more on this later) • Occasionally if trying to focus on something small in the frame. The lens will search a bit and then give up . I have to release the shutter button and repress to get it to search for focus again. Yuck. • The AF is not accurate on my 5D MKIII nor my older camera. In my test, I went out and shot 300 pictures to test the AF. 200 with the new Sigma, and 100 with my Canon 50mm 1.4 (which is literally broken and doesnt respond all the time) I took my time and when I got back to my computer to check out the images I was loving the detail in the Sigma. It really is a stunner. However the lens blew focus far too often. Of the 200 sigma images, it missed focus (just by a bit but nonetheless missed) 38 times out of 200. My broken cheapo canon missed 3 images. As a professional, this is absolutely unexceptable. I cant have the lens blowing focus when the bride is walking down the aisle, during the first kiss, or capturing any little once in a lifetime moment. It needs to nail the focus. It must. If you are not shooting important events and are just using this for personal projects then Im sure you could live with it just fine. I pretty much look to my canon 135mm f/2 as the lens I compare all others to in terms of AF prowess. At around the same price as this sigma the 135s AF is instantaneous, nearly silent, spot on accurate and leaves absolutely nothing to be desired. Comparing the AF of these lenses one after another just really shows how far off the sigma is. I can buy another Canon 50 (for stills) and a Rokinon 50 cine (for my video days) for less then this lens and never have to worry about the focus being an issue. I saw many people write about the lack of any chromatic aberrations and color fringing. It is pretty minimal in most cases. (mostly with the in focus bits) But sometimes I am seeing lots and lots of it. (see the image of the tree against the sky) I know that image is a pretty extreme high contrast situation but the sheer amount of green and purple color fringing in this image is unusable. Its easily removed in stills but not so much in video which I will primarily will be using this lens for. Speaking of shooting video...Though the focus ring is mostly very smooth. During my time with this lens shooting video I noticed some slight slipping of the ring when racking focus and some minor stickiness at times. Nothing major but certainly not ideal. Id go as far to say that it seems like it can be a bit inaccurate when I was pulling focus. Definitely better then the Canon 50 1.4 but again that lens in a third of the price. But this is just another example of times that Ive realized most of the people out there reviewing and posting their thoughts on gear, dont actually use gear on a daily basis for hundreds of jobs a year. How have only hand full of the hundreds of people that have provided feedback on this lens mentioned these problems that are so clearly obvious .Anyone giving this lens a 5 star rating is clearly not testing or using other brands of gear to compare this against. If this lens was $400 I would totally get it. But this is marketed and priced as a pro lens. Sadly however, this is not a pro lens.