Equipment test

Cool, a friend dropped in, just back from some weeks in Texas. He brought back a 10D with Big-ED, 17-40L, EF 85mm 1.8 and Sigma 20 f/1.8. So while he and my father drinks their coffee, I take his lenses out for a spin.. See you later =)

The Sigma 20mm f/1.8 will definetly be put on my list of future purchases. Sure the lack of HSM makes it noisy, and the clutch-system for af/mf sucks, but hey, it's wide and fast, and from the few test-shots I did, the quality of the shots became very good. And the focus-distance.. WOW!

But of course, the 17-40L looked just as good from my testshots, _and_ gives the benefits of a zoom. But it's sloooow. Good landscape-lense, but I need the fast aperture for indoor-shooting, so the sigma is higher on my list for now. When I can justify a dedicated landscape-lense, the 17-40 will probably be the one.

85mm f/1.8.. Nice, good results, fast. Maybe I'll get it some day, I could definetly see occasions where it would be handy. Didn't remark itself in focus-distance, but the quality was very nice.

BIG-ED.. I _NEED_ this one. His camera just feels so much better than mine do And the extended batteries would come in handy.... the day 8GB microdrives get cheap

550EX. Oh halleluja! I'm owning one before next winter, for sure. The indoor-portraits I took of the owner of the equipment and my dad, as they where talking in the couch really looked natural, and had a very nice and warm touch. Not even comparable to shooting straight into their face with the inbuilt one..

And that's all the equipment I managed to try today. But feel free to mail me other nice equipment, and I shall put up my personall mini-review of it =D

And that's all the

vvisard:
The 20/1.8 is a very good lens.... but not at 1.8 !
It start to be useful after f/2.5 or so and to f/12. After start to be increasely soft again (difraction problems?)
Wideopen it has a lot of ghosting and purple fringing, and it´s very soft!

You can find my series of shots at different apertures here:

http://www.photo-forums.com ….l6KgbLKLbfF.3@​.ee985e7/0

I'm pretty sure that the 20mm f/1.8 sufferes from "this one is better than that one" QC problems as many Sigma's are reported to do.

There seem to be ones out there that can be pretty damn sharp at 1.8... but obviously not all of them.

I didn't test it against cromatic abbrevations (or however it's spelled (English not native language). But I tested it to shoot a flower, at all apartures from 1.8 to 4.0 or so, and the flower was very sharp on all of them. Hard to tell if the corners where screwed, since on those apartures, everyting except the flower itself was out of focus. I will mainly have this lens for an indoor-lens shooting concerts and other events with poor lightning, so I think it will do fine. Definetly (still) high on my list of future purchases

The Sigma 20mm f/1.8 is a mediocre performer at 1.8 - but will catch those poor light shots where critical sharpness will be excused anyway. Stopped down it performs very satisfactorily - across the frame - considering it's price tag. Colour is neutral and CA is well under control. Distortion is on a par with what you would expect form a 20mm lens.

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It suits my needs quite good then. The times I need 1.4 or 1.8 is incredible seldom due to the reduced DOF it gives, but rather as a needed tool to go alongside ISO-800 or ISO-1600. And at those ISO-levels, some sharpness-loss is a lot easier to forgive, as the noise will be the worst "enemy" anyway.