Tries two copies a couple of years back, both soft and uneven. Gave up after the second and stuck with my 10-20 & 12-24. I'm still thinking about one though. I might only need the extra 2mm for 1% of my interior shots, but those are shots I'm having to compromise right now, so it would be nice.
Anything different about the more recent copies? Good reviews were already there when I bought. Didn't help in my case.
I love it so far, though I have yet to work it out for a real job. I am not too worried about the corners, but they do seem a tad bit soft. F8 - F11 clears most of that up though.
I am playing around with the distortion controls in LR to see what works best. Not settled on that part yet.
Overall, its sharp, snappy to focus, and the 2mm is worth it for me.
I recently rejected two new copies of the 8-16 for decentering, most visible at 8mm. I now have a third that seems better than the other two, but I haven't yet put it through its paces. So QC is still variable on this lens.
Here's a comparison set of images from the first sample, which was the worst of the three. I used the highly scientific testing method of slipping out of the office for a little bit and shooting a scene at infinity with the camera in various orientations. The really bad edge of this copy was the top edge.
Apparently imgur resizes the full-size images, but that doesn't matter because the defect is not at all subtle.
For the second copy (not shown), the photos gradually got softer as you went toward the left side, but there wasn't a seemingly abrupt transition to smeariness as with the first copy.
Thanks for the replies. I guess it's just my luck to get such opposite user feedback, both recent. I will say the one from infimum sounds a lot like my first run with this lens. I know I can buy and return if it's another dud, but I hate to waste the time and effort if my chance of success is low. Why are all the expert reviews for this lens so glowingly positive?
Yep, and I have ton of shots up from it from my Canon 60d days. Mine was a good copy. Look at the design of the lens, friggin complex, I would NOT have bought this if I couldnt' have tried it first. There is field curvature, be aware of it. Mine was much sharper at the corners than any other wide angle crop zoom I'd tried (much better than my Tokina 11-16mm was, but that lens let you easily use filters and gave you 2.8...win some lose some).
http://amanathia.zenfolio.com/p434894709/h165d7adf#h111f0b68 here's one, last time I linked a larger version of a pic a mod got mad and you can't rly tell anything from the 800 pixel wide shots, so you can peruse around the site for pics taken w/it if you want. =p
Thanks for coming over to post this, Woos. I guess I'll take my chances with this lens one last time. Btw, the high distortion at 8mm should be expected, but at 12mm the 8-16 has less distortion than any of the 12-xx lenses. That could be a nice bonus right there, as long as the distortion is geometrically simple.
Just out yesterday doing some stuff around town and thought I would share a shot to show what my copy gets me… and I am adding a corner crop.
This has been given my normal LR4 corrections which include auto CA correction and a small amount of sharpening. In this specific case, I shot into the sun (just behind a lamppost light) and subsequently lifted shadows a little and dropped highlights a little.
I am very happy with the performance so far and it equals that of the FX 12-24 I just sold.
Thanks for posting the image, David. You too, tjny, I forgot to thank you. I pulled the trigger on one today. B&H was kind enough to take back the last one. I hope they'll get to make a sale this time. I looked at my account there and it's been two years and a day since I bought it that time.
I took the free ship. Feedback to follow in a couple of weeks.
Got the lens today, which is sooner then I expected. I walked out when I heard the UPS truck to save the lens from the 'UPS toss.'
Opened the package, mounted the lens, took 4-5 test shots and the lens is amazingly bad. Wide open it's a mess. At f/8 it's soft and possibly uneven. I only took five shots and stopped. I already know the score.
The lens was packed nicely, but it looked like it's been out of the package. Subtle signs like the way the plastic wrap looks a bit more wrinkled, or the small smudge on the lens cap. There was also a little dust on the front element. This might just be less than pristine packing at the factory, so I won't jump to conclusions here. But could very well be a returned lens. No way to know for sure.
I'll take a more complete set of test shots this weekend, but I'm not holding much hope.
Some samples from today. These were shot on a tripod using the camera's timer. Lighting is a single bounced strobe, so shadows are present. I didn't bother to gel it and I'm using different apertures anyway. I just adjusted the color temperature by eye, so there is some noticeable color shift. The point is sharpness and distortion.
All images shot as JPEGs with basically no processing. Focal length is 8mm. Crops are 100%.
DavidWEGS wrote:
So... What are you thinking? Good enough?
This one is for work. So no, not good enough.
I don't know if it's readily noticeable, but the center sharpness of this lens doesn't improve from f/4.5 to f/8. I'm guessing that's caused by a focus shift as you stop down, which is an optical defect. I had a Sigma 50/1.4 that did this. A replacement was well corrected and a keeper. Although I have to say the bokeh of the defective lens was magic.
It's been a couple of years since I used one of these. I'm more impressed than I remembered with the symmetry of the distortion and just how wide 8mm is. I might just have to try one more pull at the Sigma slot machine and hope to get three in a row this time..
Now that you mention it, I don't see any change from from about F5.6 - F11 in the center sharpness. My copy seems similar to yours, but I am happy with it for what I want… This was at F8
Cool shot, David. I like the attitude. I think your copy is crisper than mine, but hard to say. Mine was not as bad in the full test as it was the first few snaps, but it's still quite bad.
We have quite a few samples posted in this thread. Anyone care to comment?
Since you are using these on a crop sensor then I can say that the distortion is considerably less than the Sigma 10-20 I used to use on my Pentax K5 cameras. The sharpness is not acceptable for any crop - though you are not usually cropping with an UWA and I'm sure some work in PP can raise the levels.
The benefit of the distortion is that you are going to lose less mm in correction so it will act more like a 9-10mm with straight lines. For interiors (I took hundreds of interior shots with the 10-20, it was good enough for my needs) the lens looks fine though and an improvement on any of the 10-20, 10-24 UWA crop sensor lenses.
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