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sigma 120-300mm f2.8 EX HSM Lens

Started by anglefire, October 25, 2009, 08:07:12 PM

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anglefire

I went to Mallory Park last weekend (17th October) to go to the first Rally Cross racing there for about 30years.

I rented this lens for the event as I wanted something a bit long than I owned.

Having rented the Canon EF300mm f2.8IS earlier in the year, I can make a reasonable fist at a direct comparison.

Firstly general impressions:

1 .Weight. Pretty even, both around 2.5kg
2. Balance. Pretty even, both sit nicely in the hand.
3. Handling. Zoom ring on the Sigma is very stiff to turn. Didn't really cause a problem on the day, but the muscles my left arm knew that they had had a work out. I had a chat with someone else who has the same lens and it was quite a bit looser, so I'm going to assume that it improves with age, as the lens I had looked pretty new.
Zoom ring on the Sigma goes the same way as Canon Zooms. A huge plus for me. :)
4. Focusing. Both have full time manual focusing - didn't manually focus all day with either lenses, so can make no opinion of how they work in practical turns. Focus ring on the Sigma is close to the body.
5. Focus speed. No comparison, the Canon is way faster. Really noticeable, however, for the cars I was taking, it didn't cause too many misses. I wasn't surprised, as the Canon is the reference lens used by Canon when they quote focusing speeds!
6. Sharpness. The Canon does again win here, but not by a significant amount, though is noticeable.
7. Image Stabilisation. The sigma doesn't benefit from any form of IS, however, I didn't find it an issue. I managed to get sharp shots of stationary subjects at below the accepted shutter speeds for the focal length. Not as slow as the canon, but quite acceptable considering. Shooting the cars at Mallory, I found that panning down to a Tv of 1/125" @ upto 300mm, had a keeper rate of around 80% - most of the failures being due to vertical movement when the cars went over a bump more than anything else. I did get 1 acceptably sharp shot at 1/25" @ 300mm out of about 10 taken, increasing the shutter speed to 1/30" improved things to around 15%.
8. Image Quality. The lens hood on the Sigma is a fair bit shorter than the Canon, due to it being a Zoom lens. This did result in some flare when shooting into the sun, however, at all other times, flare wasn't an issue.
Straight out of the camera, the images have good contrast and colour. Not noticeably any better or worse than the Canon.
9. Flexibility. The Sigma wins here, being a Zoom lens, but only if you need that ability. It was very useful at Mallory. The Canon would have been too long for some parts of the circuit.
10. Value for Money. This is a difficult one. Street price for the Sigma is around £2500, the Canon around £3800. Neither are cheap and both are hard to justify as an amateur unless you are really serious and use them a lot. Hiring is a viable alternative, the Sigma being around £75 to hire over a weekend, the Canon around £100. But sometimes they will be hard to get hold of depending on what other events are on.

One final thing, the Sigma has that black matt finish, which doesn't seem to me to be particularly durable - it marked over the day I used it, and I am careful with my gear!

Sample images below.



I did try and imbed some more - but it doesn't want to play!
----------------------------------
Mark
* A HISTORY OF THE UNIVERSE - THE SHORT STORY* 'Hydrogen is a light, odourless gas, which, given enough time, turns into people.'

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