Which looks better? 35mm shoot out.

The Photo Ninja wrote:

http://www.bershatsky.com/Family/35mm-shootout

I got a used sigma 35 mm f/1.4 the other day and the usb dock to tweak the lens. It was front focusing severely and needed quite a few adjustments.

I've dialed it in to the best of my ability and spent the day shooting with the Sigma and the Canon 35mm f/1.4 lenses. Lightroom displays the metadata of the lens to make it easy to see which is which.

I shot everything at f/1.4 to see which lens has a better hit ratio for focusing. Beyond that, I would appreciate some opinions on which looks better.

Shot these as jpegs in faithful rendering.

As I type this, I am uploading all of the files I shot today. Of course, I'm not going to keep all of these images, it was more for testing.

I know these are just test shots, and I do not mean to be harsh, but the f1.4 aperture and/or the 35mm FOV wasn't appropriate for at least a significant percentage of the subject matter so the point is, I am not sure if these "gun-slinging" shots (aka handheld shots) are a fair "competition" for either lens in terms of focusing and sharpness. I know I would do a controlled test on a tripod to take the human touch out of the equation before allowing such shots and the opinions of random contributors on DPR (including me) influence your decision (if you are trying to decide which to keep).

The 35mm FOV seemed more appropriate for the indoor tighter shots unless you intend to do a lot of cropping. You are probably closer to your subjects while indoors. The closer you are the more often shots where one person is in focus and the other is oof (or half a face in focus and the other oof) will be the norm and this doesn't agree with me eg mother and daughter in the booth. These shots I presume are about the interplay between the two people which I believe both should be "featured". If you are trying to isolate one or the other person, why not just crop out the blurry person?

The bokeh in the bottom left on Canon 1 of 15 is truly fugly but the bokeh in other images seems ok.

To answer your question, generally, the in-focus portions of the 35L images seem sharper and appear to have more (better?) contrast. This contrast could be attributed to superior coatings perhaps. My takeaway: I could work with either lens in PPing primarily because I shoot with tri/monopods and LV most of the time. If the issue is AF, it appears that the 35L is nailing it more often.

The reason I do not own either one: I own the Zeiss 35/2 ZF instead. 1.) I rarely shoot a serious image below f2.8, 2.) The Zeiss' color and contrast is more desirable to me than the that of the 35L and 3.) the lack of AF is actually helpful and forces me to dial in the correct focus. If I need AF @ 35mm, I'll use the 24-70 II.