Sigma 321954 85 mm F1.4 DG HSM Art Canon Mount Lens - Black

Product Information

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art replaced the Viltrox 1.8/85 in my camera bag. The Sigma traveled with me through the alps and always finds its way into my camera bag whenever I go outside. Due to the wide aperture, this lens is my very best friend in darker settings. It allows me to take beautiful images without introducing artificial light or noise into my shots. This helps preserve the image quality. Sony 85mm is also a very new lens. Sony is the leading company in the mirrorless segment and they know that they need to produce more and more lenses everyday and their GM series is the best lenses Sony have. When we look at the results, at f/1.4 it is a little bit soft but gets sharper at f/1.8 and stays sharp. I found this lenses behaviour very close to Sigma 85mm Art, but the price is not the same. But again, Sony 85mm is a great lens for Sony mirrorless users who don’t want to use adapters on their bodies. The beauty of third-party manufacturers is that they can provide lenses for all the different brands. The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art was specifically designed for full frame DSLRs. As a result, it is compatible with a variety of mounts like the Canon EF models (like the EOS 6D, EOS 90D, and EOS 5D), Nikon F models (like the D750, D6, and D850), the Sony E, and Leica L.

So who is this lens for? In case you are looking for a fast and relatively compact 85mm lens for portraits and landscapes this is your lens.Let’s get to our main topic, the “Sigma 85mm Art”. There’s no question, this is a great lens. The competitors are all more expensive than the Sigma, but Sigma nearly achieves the same performance at all apertures. The bokeh quality is also great. Pros Overall the two more modern lenses seem really similar in the final rendering, to the extent that maybe in real world the differences will be The performance at infinity is very good from wide open, so I would not hesitate to use the lens wide open when needed. At f/4 the lens peaks and the performance is outstanding all the way into the corners. Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art | f/4 (panorama) Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art | f/4 Portrait distance To protect the glass, I have been using a B+W 86mm XS-Pro Clear MRC-Nano 007 filter for two years. The filter has had no effect on the image quality, so I would highly recommend it.

Sunstars have never been high on Sigma’s priority list and the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 is no exception. The eleven not perfectly aligned aperture blades result in rather fuzzy sunstars with 22 rays. This is a portrait lens though, so complaining about sunstars is a bit unfair. Coma Now, if aesthetics are your thing, know that this lens is bulky once on a camera body and adds an extra bit of weight that you usually don’t expect from primes, especially the Sigma Art collection. At 85mm for a full frame, to get it to be as bright as 1.4 means it has large glass elements, and likely a lot of them, and thus heft and added weight. So here, the choice of making it f/1.4 has led to the engineering issue which requires it to be a more heavy-set lens. [LEARN: Free Engagement Photography Guide] Auto-focus In general autofocus is fast and reliable. Eye AF works like a charm on my a7RIII. For portraiture I have absolutely no complaints. For those that don’t want to jump into the nitty gritty details, here is a TLDR version of our review: pros You can use a 50mm lens for both portraits and outdoor scenes. It has a shallow depth of field that’s wide enough for gorgeous landscapes. The focal length works wonders when composing shots.

Contact

For Nikon’s DSLR users, I recommend the Nikon AF-S 85mm f/1.8Fand Nikon AF-S 85mm f/1.4G. The Nikon AF-S 85mm f/1.8F is super light, much smaller, and about half the price of the Sigma. For a beginner, the Nikon option is the perfect tool for learning. For the price you pay, the image sharpness and smooth bokeh are unparalleled. The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art gives minimal chromatic aberration at f/1.4 and shows minimal (invisible to the naked eye) barrel distortion. In my experience, the lens reaches its ultimate sharpness between f/2 and f/5.6. These lenses still offer a fantastic value in image quality for their price, but it is going to be important to see how the new Sigma 85mm Art holds up in durability and consistency over time. speed Mounted on the full-frame Canon 1Ds Mark III, corner softness is much more prominent; wide open at ƒ/1.4, the lens still shows 2 blur units of sharpness in the center, but the corners soften to 3-4 blur units. This performance improves as the lens is stopped down; mostly in terms of the center of the frame, but the corners do become somewhat sharper. The sharpest full-frame results are achieved at ƒ/5.6, where the center of the frame shows 1 blur unit and the corners just under 1.5 blur units. There's similar performance at ƒ/8, and by ƒ/11, diffraction limiting starts to take away from the sharpness, but similarly to what we noted with sub-frame performance, it's still showing 1.5 blur units across the frame. Fully stopped-down results are just over 2 blur units across the frame. I've appreciated this lens together with the Nikon D700, and I think it's a very good choice to spare money (in comparison with the double costly Nikkor), keeping an high quality.