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

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Ill start with the transparency that is telling you that Ive owned this lens now for one week. Its not a significant amount of time to fully review any lens, but I always come back to update on my lens reviews after a few months, so this is just my initial thoughts. Ive used this lens on two jobs so far and have been very pleased. This lens went on my Nikon D810 for two paid jobs. My first job was tethered shooting in studio with controlled lighting. I DID NOT shoot at f/1.4 - in fact f/16 all night for product style photography and the image quality that came out was superb. But youd expect ultimate sharpness at f/16 in controlled lighting. The the build quality is pleasantly bulky and sturdy feeling. No rubber gasket for weather sealing but Im not super worried about that. I then took this out the following day on a frozen lake to do some shooting for a client and found this to be a better performance test. I tested a range from f1.4 up to f/11 both using nd filters screwed on and without. Image quality was fantastic all the way down to 1.4 (where the image was focused). The plane of focus is razor thin, but being careful and slow allows for a good percentage of shots in focus. I only have my previous nikkor 50mm f/1.8 to compare to and this sigma blows it out of the water. This is a whole lot sharper. I hope to take this out and test it in more landscape scenarios and astrophotography to get a handle on how well it handles in the corners wide open in low light scenarios.

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Second and last Sigma Ill buy. 35mm ART was defective, or just really terrible. Now the 50mm, it just goes to show me that great optical specs dont always translate into beautiful images. Up against my buddies Nikkor 50mm 1.4G the Simga is the clear loser. It has zero character, no contrast, no life. I shot RAW only, have no idea what jpgs look like, and side by side the Nikkor kills it. In studio I dont have do a single adjustment, the Sigma took 7-8 minutes to get back skin tones. This is my first and second purchase of third party lenses out of 14-15 lenses... Never again

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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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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.

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The lens is beautiful, the quality is excellent, but my wrists cant take the strain for long periods of time. The lens is nearly 2 pounds, and when its attached to my Nikon D5600, which is relatively lightweight, it creates an uncomfortable shift in the balance that strains my wrists. Im not weak, but Im very petite with apparently sensitive wrists. When I upgrade my camera body this year (likely to something heavier), Ill consider repurchasing in hopes that a more balanced set-up will be more comfortable. I wish there was somewhere near me to rent this gear before buying!

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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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if you own a D750, be prepared to have this lens macro adjusted to that body. it seems to focus fine on my D600. kind of disappointed that I have to take it in for calibration before I can use it.

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I am a professional wedding photographer shooting with a 5Dmkiii and 6D. I have owned all three of Canons current 50mm lenses. This lens is head and shoulders above them all. After I micro adjusted the lens, the focus is quick and spot on. It is razor sharp. Even at f1.4 it is much sharper even then my 135L @f2. The color and contrast at f1.4 are perfect. No purple haze or CA like I experienced with the 50 f1.2. It is bigger and heavier than Canons 50mm offerings, but not as heavy as the Canon 85mm 1.2L. More like the 135 f2. Well done Sigma. Update on durability: I dropped then lens while shooting a wedding. It fell hard about three feet onto a marble floor. Something inside of it came loose. Sent it into Sigma and it was 150 to get it fixed.

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By far the best lens I own. The sharpness cant be beat. Its on the heavy side I will admit but its so worth it. I used it with my APS-C sensor and it was a nice 75mm portrait lens with the crop factor and now using it with my full frame and plan to still use it as a portrait lens, especially for larger families. You wont be disappointed here. I dont notice any problems without image stabilization unless youre using a really low shutter speed and if you are, just use a tripod. All around a great lens and my favorite lens right now.

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This is a very common problem with this new larger design The lens will begin to loosen at the base and will become unusable. Google something like "Repair loose Sigma Art lens" and you will see. Now I can either risk repairing it myself or pay and wait for a repair. I loved the old Sigma 50mm but this one is poorly designed and I wish we never bought it. I would absolutely avoid this lens.

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