Anyone use the Sigma 16mm F1.4 ?

Sittatunga wrote:

Larry Rexley wrote:

I agree, I keep thinking about the Viltrox 23mm f1.4 to get another stop advantage from the Canon 22mm f2, but its image quality from reviews has kept me from buying it.

I do extremely low-light railroad videos with the M6ii, and lately have been shooting them with a fast prime wide-angle on an M6ii and a fast telephoto on a second M6ii.

The Samyang (Rokinon) 21mm f/1.4 would be well worth trying if you can get hold of it. I think mine is sharper than my EF-M 22mm with stronger colours and a tiny amount of simple barrel distortion. It's 3x the size of the Canon 22mm but less than half the size of the Sigma 16mm and 120g lighter. Come to think of it, it's so much better for astro than the RF 35mm that I sent my RF lens back. The UK importers discontinued it just before I bought mine, and it's expensive for a manual focus lens without contacts, but you're used to those. I've not checked mine for flare against my 22mm, but this is what lenstip.com said about its flare. https://www.lenstip.com/462.9-Lens_review-Samyang_21_mm_f_1.4_ED_AS_UMC_CS_Ghosting_and_flares.html. thoroughly recommended if you can live without autofocus at f/1.4.

Thanks for your thoughts on this, I've been looking at the Roki 21mm f1.4... I've had great experiences with the Roki 12mm f2, 8mm f2.8 fisheye, and 135mm f2.0 mentioned above. All are sharp and have nice, slightly warmer color rendering that the Canon and Sigma lenses.

I do feel that AF is very important for my train videos --- at the distances I'm shooting the train is close to me and moving, so focusing needs to be fast and continuous. For the wider 12mm and 8mm focal lengths, manual focus would be good enough due to the depth of field even at f2, but at 15-16-22mm and f1.4, AF becomes a must-have for me.

Also for me, already having the Roki 12, Siggy 16, Canon 22, Canon 32, and the 3 Canon EF-M zooms that cover the 22mm focal length I've invested a lot in this lens range already, and am reluctant to crowd that field a little more.

I think I'm just going to fall back to using the Siggy 16mm for the wide shots as the compromise. There really is no lens that can do what the Siggy 16mm f1.4 does --- which is why it's such a popular lens across brands. Its usefulness offsets its higher size and weight compared to the other EF-M native lenses we're used to --- we have to keep in mind that the Siggy 16's size and weight is close to what full-frame users are used to.

I thought about using the M200 as its 4k video is cropped and would give the Siggy 16mm f1.4 about the desired 22m, field of view --- but the M200's sensor is 2/3 EV noisier in low light, its 4k video max is only 24 fps and not the 30 fps I shoot in for youtube, and the 4k video AF uses contrast-based focus instead of the slower dual-pixel AF. The M50ii would have the same issues.

... From the reviews, I think the Viltrox would give me similar results to the Canon 22mm, with enough flare and color fringing to make it unusable for the night train videos I create, and not enough sharpness across the frame to get clean results.