badlydrawnboy wrote:
Yes, I'll be very curious to see if this is the real deal or a thinly veiled promotional ploy as Glassbottle suspects.
I think it could be both. This may be Sigma's attempt to start a rumour that the >1009 lenses are fixed -- and such a rumour would have to be true to do Sigma any good.
Have you noticed how many views this thread has had? Close to 50k. Obviously everyone on the entire Internet who googles "Sigma 50mm" lands up here. If I were Sigma I would certainly choose to do damage-control here.
Glassbottle, sorry to dissapoint you but I am definitely not a sigma rep. I prefer to read posts rather than write them.
I will post some photos when I buy the lens and then we will really know if the problem is fixed or not. I am only going on the word of a camera store clerk here in Tokyo. For all I know he could have been lying to me but... I really don't know.
Fotovideo in Oslo had a very agreeable price on all Sigmas today and I couldnīt wait anymore. Got the 50 finally today. I tested two there before to terrible backfocus results. Unfortunately they only had below-1009xxx copies in stock, (if this number really means anything remains to be seen) but with a refund option I took my chances.
This lens is completely useless. It backfocuses a meter while focused at four five meters. Only when very close to the subject can I get it to focus properly. Also I hate the manual focus ring - it is so stiff it jumps from position to position when turning it, making it virtually impossible to fine adjust focus. I am used to stiff Sigmas, but this takes the cake. Maybe with wear it will smoothen out, but why do I have to wait for this?
Admittedly it delivers beautiful images, I really loved the images it gave me on the street on the way home, but is a technical wreck. Mine is going back tomorrow and I donīt think I will be getting another one until Sigma officially lets us know it works. I can live with the MF issue if the AF issue works, but now nothing works properly.
I am quite pissed off both at Sigma and the store that noone owns up to this issue. Actually I think it is quite insulting to peopleīs understanding of photographic equipment that they sell you a defect lens passing it off as fine.
I simply gave up looking for the Sigma.
I told the people in the store what the problem is, they said they were going to talk to sigma an 6 weeks later they still had the same defective lens in their shelf.
I decided not to buy it there and not anywhere else. The 400 were reasigned to a Markins M20
I was going to order a lot of Sigma to carry in our shop until both Sigma and the supplier told me it was my fault and I didn't know how to use a fast lens. Sometimes admitting a fault is good for business.
I will order sigma for customer orders, but on the shelves it's going to be Tamron, Tokina and 1st party lenses. Real "alt" glass won't really sell for us
m_appeal wrote:
I'm confused by the DPreview review of this lens saying that it's extremely soft in the corners on FF vs others saying it's very sharp?
DPReview has no consistent testing methodology. The only thing consistent about DPR is that it is consistently wrong. Do your own tests rather than believing anything you read there.
brainiac wrote:
DPReview has no consistent testing methodology. The only thing consistent about DPR is that it is consistently wrong. Do your own tests rather than believing anything you read there.
I suppose. I think I'm still learning that "reviews" aren't everything.
Scroll down a little bit for pictures of the dogs...
I don't want to criticise the OP of that thread but it seems he didn't use any masking when sharpening those dog shots (which are quite heavily sharpened), so the blur has been sharpened in PP. I saw no such choppiness with my copy.
One thing that annoys me with the bokeh on these ultra-fast lenses is longitudinal chromatic aberration... is it not possible to make an ultra-fast normal or portrait length lens (or even wide angle for that matter) with apochromatic characteristics?
The widest APO's I've ever seen are the Leica 90mm f/2 Summicron and Voigtlander 90mm f/3.5 APO. I know that some zooms like sigma 70-200 are "APO" as well but I don't use zooms (or sigma anymore).
EDIT: CoastalOptic make the amazing 60mm f/4 true APO lens and leica make an m-mount 75/2 APO... but it seems nothing is near the affordable range with a relatively large aperture.
thrice wrote:
One thing that annoys me with the bokeh on these ultra-fast lenses is longitudinal chromatic aberration... is it not possible to make an ultra-fast normal or portrait length lens (or even wide angle for that matter) with apochromatic characteristics?
The widest APO's I've ever seen are the Leica 90mm f/2 Summicron and Voigtlander 90mm f/3.5 APO. I know that some zooms like sigma 70-200 are "APO" as well but I don't use zooms (or sigma anymore).
EDIT: CoastalOptic make the amazing 60mm f/4 true APO lens and leica make an m-mount 75/2 APO... but it seems nothing is near the affordable range with a relatively large aperture....Show more →
The best solution to this problem is to use a Canon lens and the lens CA correction option in DPP. It makes almost all your Canon lenses APO lenses, cheaply.
I don't even know what you mean. It does have a distance slider if that's what you mean, but I don't think that means it can correct for colour shifts off the focal plane.
brainiac wrote:
DPReview has no consistent testing methodology. The only thing consistent about DPR is that it is consistently wrong. Do your own tests rather than believing anything you read there.
What is the rationale behind this statement?
I'll be the first to say that DPReview's camera reviews leave much to be desired. Too many misleading charts, too much reliance on in-camera JPEGs, and a ridiculous amount of importance placed on default settings. They would test a $7000 digital SLR as though it was going to be operated by a moron with a $99 point & shoot. Their reviews read like a bunch of nonsense dressed up with many, many pages of colorful graphs.
But that's for their camera reviews.
I thought that their lens reviews are actually quite good. As good as any I've seen on the net. I don't see one single thing wrong with the way they conduct and present their lens tests. It's one of the few good things to come out of DPReview in the last few years.
