When in the summer of the year before last year first rumors about the 150-600mm Sports and Contemporary lens surfaced, I was skeptical. I simply couldn’t imagine that Sigma would bring two such lenses onto the market. Super-telephoto zooms are a very special type of lenses and Tamron had released its 150-600 lense six months prior to that. But contrary to all expectations, Sigma introduced the two lenses in the run-up to the Photokina.
As it is now reported on the blog Egami, another xx-600mm lens could follow up soon – with an emphasis on “could”, though. The patent that has been found by the Japanese blog describes a full frame compatible 120-600mm f/5-6-.3 lens, with a length of 31.4cm. For comparison: The current 150-600 S is “only” 29cm long. As you can see in the image published by Egami, the optical construction of the 120-600 lens also consists of 24 elements. It’s unclear how many groups they actually form.
Image source: Egami
However, you shouldn’t hope for too much, because in the domain of optics it’s common to patent several only slightly varying types of an optical design.
