Sigma 35mm f/1.4 - Fourth Times a Charm? Also Sigma Q&A

Al Downie wrote:

That's a great shot!!

The family moment I had in mind was very similar, taken at similar range. I shot about 20 frames, without checking, because I was confident of my exposure, steady hand and focus. Boy was I wrong - every single frame was out of focus. And not just a wee bit soft when viewed at 100% - they were all completely unusable: front-focused by about 5-10cm at a range of about 80cm. ZERO% keepers! And a unique moment lost.

That must have been a real bummer, I would have been so annoyed to have missed capturing the moment due to lens mis-behaviour.

As I said before, I did experiment with the USB dock (took +20 at the three close ranges to achieve a sharp image, but then when I repeated the experiments later I had to drop that down to +5. That was weird, so I started shooting LOADS of images at 0.6m, defocusing before each shot (sometimes to a distance in front of the subject, sometimes behind), and found that the results were completely inconsistent. So no amount of fiddling with the dock would be of any use. That's when I sent it to Sigma, who returned it a week later after servicing/testing, and it behaved exactly the same way when I tested it.

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/alastairdownie/

Like you, I would have given up on the lens at that point, why struggle when there are alternatives available.  I have been more than tempted to try the 35mm f/2 IS.

Definitely, with so many users reporting the issue with the Sigma 35mm 1.4, I think I got lucky with my copy.