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Sigma 50-150mm f/2.8 EX DC APO OS HSM - part 2 of 1 2 3 4 5

by Mike McNamee Published 01/08/2012

It is recommended that the OS is turned to the off position before detaching the lens. The one second delay for stabilising the image might be an impediment for some - we hardly noticed it in a variety of shooting situations. The claim is that you can grab four additional stops of shutter before the onset of shake.

The lens hood is a plastic, petal shape which snaps on with a quarter turn. The filter is a 77mm screw fitting.

In Use We found the lens snapped into focus without any fuss or issues. The Nikon D700 test body automatically cropped the files to DX format (for that is the way we set it up!) thus doubling the number of images on a given storage card. The lens hood was visible at the corners of the FX frame.

We made several hundred shots on a variety of subjects including a full aperture sweep. This ranged from 1/5000 f2.8 up to 1/80 f22. In the series there was some vignetting f2.8 and f 4.0 but this went by f5.6. The f16: 1/160 and f22:1/80 shots were a little soft due to camera shake, diffraction or perhaps a combination of both. Overall the thing we noticed most was the limit on pixel count. Coming down from the D700 at 4,256 pixels (and now the D800 at 7,360 pixels) to the DX crop of just 2,785 pixels was something of a shock. In real pictures we could not discern any softness at the frame edges.

Optical Stabilisation Testing

Objective testing of optical stabilisation is quite a challenge outside of the laboratory.

We made an attempt using the following tests. An ISO 12233 resolution target was set up at a couple of metres distance and repeatedly photographed with and without stabilisation. For each shot the camera was defocused, lifted to eye level, focused and a shot taken. The camera was then lowered from the eye, defocused and then the process repeated. It was quite challenging to lift the 3kg combination of camera and lens and fatigue set in towards the end (60 shots in total). The unstabilised shots were made first and so the stabiliser was competing against the increasingly enfeebled editor! The initial series at 1/200th second, 80mm focal length created no fuzzy shots and so the challenge was intensified by going to 1/60th second at 150mm focal length.

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Contact Mike McNamee

1st Published 01/08/2012
last update 21/07/2022 08:46:22

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