Sigma 50mm F1.4 Art DG HSM Lens for Canon

Ive been shooting with SLRs for 15+ years. The Sigma ART 50, in terms of sharpness even at 1.4, plus its generally great low-light ability, is really impressive, and significantly better than Nikons own 50 1.4 G. (I also think its way better than Sigmas non-ART 50, which I found worse than Nikons 1.4G in terms of its low light autofocus ability as well). Is the ART 50 worth around $1k to you, new? Like almost every answer about a lot of lenses, it depends. I shoot with a d600, and perhaps the newer Nikon bodies have improved in terms of low-light autofocus ability, regardless of the lens bottleneck presented by your glass of choice, making this Sigma less necessary for say, your concert-photography needs in craptastic bar lighting. Certainly some of it must be in X and the rest in Y.. Either way, this Sigma is pretty damn good. Im not 100% into the crazy dof you get from this lens wide open. You can look online of course for samples, or, rent one from somewhere like Borrow Lenses . com. (Super useful!) to see if you do. I also notice that sometimes the autofocus doesnt entirely seem to lock onto my target, even using the single focus point that I always use. (Having the camera calibrated at my local authorized Nikon dealer with the lens didnt make a difference that I can tell). Perhaps if I got Sigmas lens dock? which lets you do firmware upgrades yourself, and tweak the autofocus somewhat, that would put this guy at a 5 star. Great work, Sigma! Some people dont like the different filter thread size on this guy compared to what theyre used to in a 50, or the weight, but it doesnt bother me. As I said earlier, though, this lens is pretty great, and Im a picky picky person. But if you dont shoot in the most challenging conditions a photographer faces (fast moving objects in low light), and dont need to shoot wide open for big dof in a small space, you might be perfectly a-ok with a lens that is new or used for half this price or less.

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(this should be more like 3.5 stars) I got this for my Nikon D810, and, like many others, I had lots of autofocusing problems; specially at f1.4. My camera seemed to always focus on something a bit closer than that I was telling it to 9 out of 10 times. This problem seemed to be less frequent at lower apertures (higher F-stop numbers), but still enough to be a problem. However, this can be fixed so that the lens focuses properly MOST of the time, but NOT ALL the time. To fix this on the Nikon D810 (sorry, thats the only camera I have), do the following: -Make sure the lens is connected to the camera and turn it on -Set the aperture to f1.4 -Press the menu button -Go to Setup Menu > AF-Fine Tune -Turn on AF fine-tune (on/off) -Experiment with the "Saved value" setting: Increment the number by 10, focus on a subject, take multiple pictures, see if that improves or reduces the quality. Increase/decrease the value and try again until you get consistent results. -In my case, I had to set the value to +20, and even then, the lens wont focus fine 100% of the time, so, always review your pictures. See the attached images for a "before and after". Both pictures were taken focusing on the dolls face; notice how in one of them the face is out of focus while the hand seems to be very well focused (thats the complete opposite of what we want!) while in the other one, the face is in focus while the hand is blurred as expected. You can download the original RAW files for the attached pictures here: https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/rT5VUaiUwgyXT0mJtPEyyhsBwnudGWfR2PPWTa1pp1Z?ref_=cd_ph_share_link_copy *IMPORTANT*: After you are happy with how frequent your autofocus works fine, be sure to test OTHER apertures to make sure you are getting good results consistently. I had to return the first lens that I got because changing the AF fine tuning value fixed the issue for f1.4, but made it worse for f2.8 and above. The replacement I got from Amazon did not have this problem. ------------------ Once the autofocus problem is fixed, I have to say, this lens is very nice. It does both very sharp pictures (at f2.8) but also has a very nice buquè effect (specially at f1.4). Keep in mind that at any f-stop value lower than 2.8, you are going to get a lot less sharpness on the edges. I dont think I can add anything else that hasnt been said here: the lens is super sharp, produces very nice results, but requires a lot of trial and error before getting used to it.

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