Sigma 18-200 3.5-6.3; any experience?

I liked my 18-200 for a outdoor with light lens. Then I got my 24-105, and have not touched my 18-200 since. Infact I just sold mine for $265.

I have this lens. Its picture quality is good enough for 8x10 prints (have not tried larger prints). This is an excellent walk around lens.

first lens i bought to replace the kit lens after countless research on what kinda lets setup i wanted. figure i keep it simple for the time being since i didnt have money to spend on a bunch of lens so i tried it.

having using it for a few days, i ended up selling it. the range is real nice but optically i didnt find it to be much better than kit lens and it gets pretty soft when you go towards the long end. im sure its a decent lens for walkaround outdoor purposes working within its limit but i ended up getting the tamron 28-75mm. this was almost a year ago though.

a year or so later, i end up spending way more in lens that what i originally thought i would .. thanks to POTN

ekk_xt wrote in post #2076615
it gets pretty soft when you go towards the long end.

The softness at the long end is probably due to misfocusing instead of true softness.

DOF is really small at 200mm for a subject that's relatively close, even at f6.3. It's easy to misfocus, not to mention, 6.3 may not give you adequate shutter speed for a sharp 200mm photo. I think a lot of it's bad press is due to user error.

I think it's an ultimate general purpose walkaround. Let's face it... 99% of your shots are not going to be printed 8x10 or larger, so who cares if it's a little softer. If it's not for professional work, I'd go for it. In fact, now that it has OS, I think it'll push me over the edge to finally go for it!

Swapping lenses and carrying around big lenses are a real PITA. My 70-200 NEVER leaves home unless it's a paid shoot. In fact, I grab the 75-300 more often. The 18-200 would be my 90%-of-the-time lens.

picturecrazy wrote in post #2076710
I think it's an ultimate general purpose walkaround. Let's face it... 99% of your shots are not going to be printed 8x10 or larger, so who cares if it's a little softer.

Actually, printing at 8x10 is still sharp from my experience (without careful examination which I have never done, I do not see any difference in picture quality compared with pictures from a "good" lens). I have not printed out larger pictures but judging from the 8x10 quality, I expect no quality problem for printing out pictures twice as large (in terms of area).

I am curious about something. When people are reporting soft focus I assume they are referring to the ability of the Auto Focus. How are lenses like this when you are manually focusing?

TMR Design wrote in post #2077850
I am curious about something. When people are reporting soft focus I assume they are referring to the ability of the Auto Focus.

Yes, it is an auto focus problem.

It focuses manually without problem as far as I can tell, and the images are sharp (well, sharp enough for 8x10 or even larger prints).

The auto focus problem seems to be an electronic problem. My copy focuses fine below 135mm (auto focus mode). But it misfocus between 135-200mm. What I normally do is (when using the 135-200 mm range) to focus at 135mm, then zoom in if needed. Yes, it is slow, but it is cheap and convenient to carry.