Sigma Reviews

I bought the Sigma Designs IF 28 300mm F3 5 6 3 DL Aspherical Hyperzoom in January, and have shot around 50 rolls of film through this lens. I bought it because I travel frequently, and often need to go back and forth between wide angles and long zooms and have had to deal with that with multiple lenses and bodies. I hoped that this hyperzoom would be the answer. Four months later, I was looking again for other lenses, and have given up trying to get an all-in-one solution.

Starting with the lens' physical attributes: The lens is wonderfully light and small. At first glance, the build quality appears to be OK, but then I start getting rings popping out of position, and the like (the best way to fix it was to jam it against a car bumper!)

The quality of the pictures suffers badly from vignetting. I usually stop down my lenses to f/8.0 to avoid vignetting, but f/13.0+ is needed with this lens when you get above 150mm focal lengths. Looking at the slides through a good loupe, the lower optical quality is obvious. The sharpness simply is not there.

The final straw... was an increasing tendancy for the autofocus to go completely haywire, forcing me to go to full manual. At times (once every 5 ot 6 pictures), the camera would lock up, and the only thing that would unlock it is to remove the lens and put it back - pointing to bad connectors. Then, a new problem turned up, where the light metering through lens is 3, 4, even 5 stops too low. On the final film I ever used with this lens I was shooting a frontlit, light-colored aircraft in full sunlight with 100 ASA film, and the camera reports a proper exposure of f/4.0 at speed 1/15th!!!

Putting the lens on my backup body results in the same results, and both cameras work fine with my several Canon lenses.

Sending the lens to be fixed (under warantee) took nearly 6 months.

Stay away!!!

I am totally happy with this lens. I like to shoot almost anything, from panoramic views to wildlife, and I felt 80% of my needs to compose the picture and get desired zoom or wideangle effect were met. As long as the subject is in contrast with its surrounding, I have never had problems with fast autofocus. The only time it couldn't focus was when I was focusing on a brown bird that was almost camouflaged by its surroundings. I also find it very easy to use, i.e. easy to adjust zoom or manually focus. The rings seem to be in appropriate place where my hand reaches for them naturally. I have other lenses where I have to get away from the view finder and figure out which ring to grab. The performance of the lens has been excellent. I have taken pictures at mid-day with extremely bright conditions, probably the worst time to take pictures, and still with merely a hood, the pictures came out great. The use of Circualar Polarizer and UV filters just puts life into a picture, even in worst conditions(bright noon).

Only problem that I encountered is that I went for overkill and put three filters, (UV, Circular, and Enhancement). This caused the light to be blocked at the edges. To overcome this I had to sacrifice the wideangle from 28 to about 45mm.

If one likes to take pictures while hiking or rock climbing etc, this lens is perfect because you don't have to worry about wideangle, or zoom lenses, and amazingly its extremely light. I have seen people with half that zoom, with longer lenses. Even more amazing is the low price.

This is the ultimate lens to take when traveling or don't want to bring the camera bag. It covers the most widely used zoom ranges. I use to regularly carry 2 lenses (a 35-105mm and 75-300mm), but now I normally only carry this one. It is very compact (looks to be about an inch longer than my Canon 35-105mm lens due to it using 3 sections to extend out instead of the standard 2 on most zoom lenses) and the lens has a lock so it won't accidently extend when carrying it. The zoom knob has a stiff and percise feel to it. The optics are good and my pictures look great. The end of the lens doesn't rotate when zooming or focusing making it easier to work with certain types of filters. The only downside is the longer exposure times needed as compared to a dedicated 300mm lens. If you are looking for a wide-range zoom lens, then this is the one to get.

This is my first Amazon review. I have been shopping with Amazon since 98. I just got this item shipped to me from Amazon today.

The main reason why I am writing this review is, the details of this product captured by Amazon are not correct. I ordered the item and then after re-reading the product specification and comparing with what I really thought I was ordering, I did more research on the web and came to the conclusion that Amazon probably had the details wrong. But since I am spending so much money, I wanted to be sure and sent an email to Amazon with more details of why I think they may have the details wrong.

I got a reply back telling me to talk to the manufacturer for more details. I sent them the product anouncement from sigma's website and asked them if that is what I ordered and if not to cancel my order. They said that the item I ordered was different and that they can't cancel the order by that time though they sent me details about how to return. I am sure they would refund me appropriately.

I decided to wait and see if the product is really different (as I couldn't find any where on the entire web a sigma lens with these specs) knowing that I would have to spend for shipping cost if I have to return (on the otherhand if I rejected from UPS, then I don't have to pay).

Finally the product came. And as I was almost sure, the product description that they have is completely wrong from what I got. And to my pleasant surprise, what I got is actually what I had in mind from the beginning.

The specific wrong information they have about this product in their "Product Specification" are
1. Lens construction: 18/16
2. Minimum focus distance: 32.7-46.1 inches
3. Maximum Magnification: 1:5
4. Filter Size: 72

Note that their mfg # is 793-110 which is consistent with Sigma's mfg # (I contacted Sigma to confirm).

Here are the real specs of the product as given in the documentation of the product I got

1. Lens construction: 15/13
2. Minimum focus distance: 19.7 inches
3. Maximum Magnification: 1:3
4. Filter Size: 62

I am leaving the product with 5 stars as I haven't used it much ( I just got it). My few minutes of experiment shows that the lens is working fine (and can already feel the difference from my 28-105mm lens that I got when I first bought SA-9 a year ago). I feel the zoom ring a bit unsmooth compared to my other lens. But may be because it is new. Other than that, I can't comment much on this lens at this time.

My main reason to write this review is so that Amazon will improve their catalog content management (and more importantly take customer inquiries more seriously and fix data errors) and people who are actually trying to buy this product will not be confused with the spec like me