I love my sigma 40 art 85 art & 105 art for stills. once u use sigma art lenses, u realize your other lenses werent as good as u might have thought. Interestingly, there seemed to be a slight loss of light when shooting with a narrow aperture, like f/16. I noticed similar results for sharpness. At f/16, all the softness suddenly disappears On my Nikon D810 , AF was dead-on for every frame, especially shot at f/1.4 where this is critical. To sum it up, I’ve never had any focusing issues with this lens, even when shooting a moving subject. I guess it’s the nature of using a Sigma Art lens. Handling and Build Quality Since the 50mm focal length has been a standard for decades, there are many alternatives to this lens in many price ranges. All major camera brands have 50mm f/1.4 lenses. And many of those brands also offer a less-expensive 50mm f/1.8 option.

It is not possible to compensate for distortion just by changing the aperture values. Thus, the lens development stage was vital in ensuring minimized distortion. The “SIGMA 50mm F1.4 DG HSM” has positioned each glass element to optimize the power layout at respective positions, and succeeded in minimizing distortion.

Sigma 50mm f/1.4 DG HSM | A review – Build and handling

As for sharpness and vignetting, this is where we can see some differences. At f/1.4, there was a noticeable amount of vignetting on this lens. The center was a fair bit brighter than the corners. This lens is a pain compared to Nikon or Canon's f/1.4 or f/1.2 lenses; this Sigma is too darn big and heavy to actually want to carry it around all day.

It seems about the same as a common unit-focussed lens, even though it is a unique internally focused design. Overall, with this lens Sigma have created a lens which performs well in terms of sharpness and other optical attributes, for a fairly reasonable price. This combination of price versus performance will almost certainly win many fans for this lens, even despite its large size and weight for a 50mm optic.

As you can see, the detail level at f/1.4 is very high. I shot many images between f/1.4 and f/2.8 in this review, specifically to demonstrate the sharpness capabilities of this lens. Canon EOS 6D + 50mm @ 50mm, ISO 100, 1/1000, f/1.6 Bokeh I see very little coma with this aspherical lens, and what little there is goes away as stopped down. Falloff of illumination towards the corners of the frame is fairly typical for a lens of this focal length and maximum aperture. At f/1.4 the corners are 2.17 stops darker than the image centre and visually uniform illumination is achieved with the aperture stopped down to f/4 or beyond.

If you remove the lens hood, stop the lens down beyond f/11 and shoot against a very bright source of light, you might see a little bit of ghosting and flare, but it is still barely noticeable and not too damaging to the image: Canon EOS 6D + 50mm @ 50mm, ISO 100, 1/100, f/16.0

Sigma 40mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art review: Build & Handling

Coma ( saggital coma flare) often causes weird smeared blobs to appear around bright points of light in the corners of fast or wide lenses at large apertures. In lenses that have it, coma goes away as stopped down. According to DxoMark metrics, it resolves 40 P-Mpix on a 50.6 MP (megapixel) Canon 5DS R model. This is an impressive sharpness score.

What does the Sigma 50mm f/1.4 offer to the already saturated market of excellent 50mm lenses from every DSLR manufacturer? For many years the focal length of 50mm lenses was considered a “standard” or “normal” focal length, because it closely resembles the perspective of the human eye. These lenses were widely popular on film cameras and the focal length was ideal for portraiture and everyday photography. As digital SLRs and zoom lenses started taking over the market, the popularity of 50mm primes also decreased. The smaller size of APS-C sensors made the field of view of 50mm lenses narrower, while the flexibility of zoom lenses and their low price drove the demand towards convenience. Now that full-frame digital cameras are getting more and more affordable, the once-forgotten 50mm lenses are regaining their popularity among many photographers. Seeing this trend, some manufacturers including Nikon have been updating and renewing their 50mm lens lines. Sigma, being a third party lens manufacturer for many brands, introduced their flagship Sigma 50mm f/1.4 EX DG HSM in 2008 and has been marketing it as a higher-quality f/1.4 lens with better characteristics than most branded 50mm f/1.4 lenses.The Sigma 50mm f/1.4 is astoundingly sharp at every setting. You just need to be sure it's in focus and that nothing moves. I compared my Sigma directly to my Nikon 50/1.4G and my Micro-NIKKOR 55mm f/2.8 AF on the test range at infinity. Sigma's caps aren't as good as Nikon's or Canon's. Leave them in the box for resale, and buy a real Nikon 77mm cap to use with this lens instead, regardless of which brand of camera you shoot (Nikon makes the best caps). Also get a Nikon rear cap or Canon rear cap and leave the Sigma cap in the box.