Sigma Endless and Forever

mike earussi wrote:

I've owned four bodies, and it's both the best and worse Sigma camera I ever had.

Best in that it was the only camera that ever produced absolutely noise free skies and shadows when shot at iso 50. Once the shot was color balanced it produced the cleanest clearest photos I've ever had.

https://pbase.com/mikeearussi/sd14_iso_50

Worse in build quality (one brand new body had the mirror fall out after a few weeks use), horrible AF and MF as the mirror wasn't aligned accurately enough to even MF (when I complained to a Sigma repair tech about the misaligned mirror he told me that the mirror was just to aid in composition , not to be used for focus, but if the AF isn't accurate either then what do you do?).

Plus every shot had to be color balanced to remove that strong yellow/green cast. Add to that the very slow processing time and you have a real PITA camera body.

The SD15 fixed most of these problems (the AF still sucked) but at the expense of adding a lot of noise to the picture.

My hope is that the new FF body will have the clean zero noise look of the SD14 with none of its flaws. We'll see.

Over the years I have read accounts like yours above. I know it is a bit mad to be even discussing a 12 year old digital camera, but I have never had had any of what you describe except the occasional stuck writing to card problem which necessitates popping the batt out and rebooting the camera. Other than that, I have had rock solid performance within the capabilities of camera. And, I must admit that my determined affection and long use of the SD14 as made me both more capable of dealing with its quirks, and too less aware of them.

I made the picture below two days ago as a red channel test to discuss with a friend. The green cast along the right edge is curtesy of the attached 55 year old lens.

SD14 DWB 400ISO SPP352 minimal edits handheld at f2.8