Advantages: Good performance. Great fun. Good value. Disadvantages: Limited uses. Canon owners should consider Canon's version.
I purchased this lens brand new in preference to the Canon EF 15mm f/2.8 fisheye, primarily because I thought it might be a better lens than the now aging Canon version. The Canon lens has not been updated in many years, having been designed originally for 35mm Canon EOS cameras. The Sigma on the other hand, is a more up-to-date design, benefiting from more recent developments in both lens design and technology and 'should' therefore, I would have thought, been a superior offering. I was wrong!
The Sigma is by no means a 'bad' lens, simply not quite as 'good' as the old Canon lens. Very good results are in fact possible but a little work is necessary post production, through image editing software, to get the very best from it. Also, a little aforethought helps when shooting with this lens and some appreciation of both it ...
Advantages: Build quality. Finish. Range. Fast maximum aperture. Disadvantages: Image quality not as good as expected. Chromatic Aberration.
removed whenever you choose to use the lens hand-held.
Being an EX DG lens, it is suitable for use on either FF (Full-Frame) or APS-C cropped sensor cameras when it effectively behaves like a 105-300mm f/2.8 (on Nikon APS-C), 112-320mm f/2.8 (on Canon APS-C) or 119-340mm f/2.8 on Sigma DSLR cameras. These make interesting options on the APS-C size sensor cameras and it can be assumed the camera has a completely different set of values when used with such cameras to those when used on full-frame. Interesting?
The fast f/2.8 maximum aperture provides great fun for shallow DOF (depth-of-field) shots where particularly at the 200mm end of the zoom, depth-of-field is excitingly shallow. Whilst the lens is referred to as 'macro' within it's descriptive title, the term is used somewhat loosely. True macro lenses provide genuine 1 to 1 life ...
Advantages: Beautiful bokeh, tack-sharp, vibration reduction, easy to use, many useful accessories Disadvantages: heavy, expensive, slight vignetting, prone to flaring
their version, the so-called "vibration reduction", was the 80-400mm f/4.5-5.6 ED. An interesting lens to be sure, but Nikon owners really started to get excited at the announcement of the AF-S 70-200 F2.8 VR. This lens, a successor of a highly regarded line of professional lenses, turned out to be spectacular: the image stabila? sorry, the vibration reduction was possibly even more effective than Canon's and the image quality? Well, I am going to discuss that right now!
---Image quality---
The 70-200 VR is a tack-sharp lens, as you would expect of a lens in this price class. It is not even in the same ballpark as normal consumer lenses: the colours are vibrant, the details sharp, and the bokeh (the appearance of parts of the picture that our out of focus) is stunning. The lens is particularly famous for the silky smooth rendering of out ...
