( 24 reviews )
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Posted: Jun 2 2009
I have been shooting with this lens for a couple of weeks now and I am impressed with the capabilities. The near-macro capabilities are amazing and I have taken some really nice flower close-up shots. I am very satisfied with my purchase.
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Posted: May 20 2009
I compared this lens with the excellent Sony 50mm f1.4 lens (arguably a bit unfair since this is a prime lens). The camera was a Sony a350. Build: Smooth secure operation. No complaints. Flare: I had heard that this was impressive and I could not induce significant flare under any circumstances - even without the included hood. Great! Chromatic aberration: If I "pixel peeped" I could sometimes see a pixel width or two of color, but no worse than the Sony 50mm. Really good! Resolution: To test this I shot text on a wall at various focal lengths from wide (17mm) to telephoto (70mm) at wide open and f8. The results were quite comparable to the pictures with the Sony 50mm lens except at the extreme edges wide open where it was a bit soft. However, at 17mm f2.8 the picture was quite soft at the edges and somewhat soft even in the middle. In this test situation, the 17mm f2.8 shot ended up at less than 3 feet from the wall. This is a bit extreme and I have not yet repeated this test at a more realistic distance. However, does this matter if it is soft at 17mm f2.8? On a recent trip to Arizona, I shot a lot at 17mm, but none of the shots were at f2.8. So I think that this is a minor point and probably typical of a lot of other zoom lenses as well. Because of the high resolution of the Sony a350 (14M pixels) any focus errors readily show up, but this can't really be blamed on the lens (the Sony 50mm sometimes misses focus also). I recently saw a discussion where focus errors were called the dirty little secret of the (various) SLR makers. Oh well, considering how fast the SLR cameras focus, I suppose it is amazing that any shots are in focus.
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Posted: May 18 2009
Bought two sigma 17-70mm. First one back-focused really bad. Sent it back for replacement. Second/replacement lens had a "de-centering" issue, where the subject on the left side of photo was blurry and the right side was in focus. These were for Nikon mount. I once owned a canon mount version that was nothing short of perfect. So, I was very disappointed when I got two bad versions for Nikon mount. Went back to the Nikon 18-70mm. Amazon's service Rocks! I will shop with Amazon again. Just not for Sigma.
