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Sigma 30mm f1.4 lens review

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Thanks for sharing.

slightly off topic what are the charges for flickr for the paid for accounts? I can't find the information on their site without having to be a member first :-S
 
MartinM2 said:
Thanks for the update!

One thing I noticed with my 50 1.8 which is a similar design in
iris to the 35 F2 is the OOF highlights are fine wide open, the
pentagon shapes don't really appear until it's stopped down a touch.
Click to expand...
Which is hardly surprising. When a lens is wide open, the aperture is always perfectly round, as the iris is completely out of view.

Borek

--
http://www.lupomesky.cz/foto/index-en.html
 
Flickr is $24 for a year, and is it ever worth it. Awesome. 2GB of upload a month, unlimited bandwidth for people to download, auto-resizing of HUGE pictures -- just up 'em out of the camera. I have a second Flickr account with +500 pics and over 70,000 hits -- I could never have hosted that myself!
 
Petteri Sulonen said:
But the fact is that AF as it is currently designed does work
extremely well and extremely reliably... if everything is
calibrated like it's supposed to be.
Click to expand...
From personal experience, I would tend to disagree with the above, since what consists in perfect calibration seems not the same accross Canon camera range, which is not the sign of a well working and extremely reliable design.

An example is my Canon EF 70-200 f/4L, which came back from service for calibration with pics taken with an EOS 1D, itself adequately calibrated, that were showing perfect focus at all focal lengths. When used with an EOS 300D (back from calibration with a tool lens, so as close as perfect as it comes), the lens back-focussed in an obvious way at 70 mm.

Because it worked perfectly of their reference 1D, Canons service did not calibrate the lens as told. It had to be sent back to service, and Canon admitted they needed a different calibration with pro bodies and the 300D for thi slens, and tweaked them to a medium-term.

Did anybody hear about back-focus issues with the Canon EF 70-200 f/4L with series 1 cameras? The absence of issues may not only be due smart and professional users there :-)

By the way,speaking about reliability, does your EF 50 f/1.4 USM lens reliably focus within 1 DOF fully open? I know mine does not. Actually, it does not even when stopped down to f/2.

Since I now own a few lenses that DO reliably focus, I am not that negative about Canon AF system. On the other hand, I would not call it "extremely reliable".
  • Armand
 
Armand Hirt wrote:
[snip]
Armand Hirt said:
By the way,speaking about reliability, does your EF 50 f/1.4 USM
lens reliably focus within 1 DOF fully open? I know mine does not.
Actually, it does not even when stopped down to f/2.
Click to expand...
It does now, with the 20D, when I'm using the center AF point.. It didn't with the 10D, though -- but the focus error was random rather than systematic. I suspect that the AF system on the 20D is simply more precise. (It's certainly supposed to be.)
Armand Hirt said:
Since I now own a few lenses that DO reliably focus, I am not that
negative about Canon AF system. On the other hand, I would not call
it "extremely reliable".
Click to expand...
I suspect we may be disagreeing about semantics. What I mean by "reliable if calibrated" means that it is possible to have a system that performs extremely consistently and predictably. Of course, this doesn't mean that the same lens on a different body or the same body with a different lens might not work as well.

Petteri
--
My flickr page: [ http://www.flickr.com/photos/primejunta/ ]
Me on photography: [ http://194.100.88.243/petteri/ ]
Me on politics: [ http://p-on-p.blogspot.com/ ]
 
Thanks for the info

I see you added some new images at different f stops of a desk.

WOW this lens is SHARP at f1.4 - awesome. The colours and contrast don't look too bad either.

(how do you find the speed of autofocus?)
 
Petteri Sulonen said:
Petteri Sulonen said:
By the way,speaking about reliability, does your EF 50 f/1.4 USM
lens reliably focus within 1 DOF fully open? I know mine does not.
Actually, it does not even when stopped down to f/2.
Click to expand...
It does now, with the 20D, when I'm using the center AF point.. It
didn't with the 10D, though -- but the focus error was random
rather than systematic. I suspect that the AF system on the 20D is
simply more precise. (It's certainly supposed to be.)
Click to expand...
Very interesting. So I have to attribute my copy unreliable focussing on a 20D to unconsistant behaviour accross lens samples.
Petteri Sulonen said:
I suspect we may be disagreeing about semantics. What I mean by
"reliable if calibrated" means that it is possible to have a system
that performs extremely consistently and predictably.
Click to expand...
I think I agree. I only object to the potent "extremely reliably" wording. It works as it should with a lot of lenses, sometimes after recalibration (which is in my opinion below reasonable expectations: one would expect further calibration to be unnecessary for parts that are basically just out of the factory) but in my experience, this predictable behaviour does not even extend to all lens/body combinations.
  • Armand
 
Bit odd that the 30mm f1.4 is a zoom?! :-)

From the product details on Sigma Japan's website:
"...creates an optimum color balance through the entire zoom range."
 
This really helps alot!

I'm amazed at the center sharpness of this lense wide open, that' quite impressive.

I was also expecting to see an obvious degradation on the sides and edges, but wide open it's really hard to see with narrow DOF. But that sharp center sure does make it pop.

I see eating lots o ramen noodles in the near future..:)
 
I did some torture tests last night. Here they are (thanks for hosting, Flickr!)



And just for giggles I pit it against my old Sigma 24-70 EX.

 
tom e said:
your point is that i didn't read the post carefully! thanks for
quoting the answer for me. :-)
--
Click to expand...
heheh no worries - was just trying to help out :)
 
The 24-70 looks sharper at 2.8 in the ceter. Can you confirm that.
 
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