For quite some time the TIPA Award Winner 2013 as „Best Professional Lens“, the SIGMA 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM, has caught my eye. Its praises have been sung in all the reviews I have read; the photos I’ve seen that had been taken with it made me impatient to finally hold it in my own hands and put it on my own camera. And as I announced last week, I’ve been the proud owner of this lens for a couple of days now. Here you can read my personal opinion of this lens.
Build quality:
The tube body of the lens is mainly made of synthetic material which, however, is processed in an extremely refined way. The metal rings stabilize the focus ring and the lens tube. And the bayonet mount is made of metal as well. The whole build quality of the lens makes it look very robust.
Compactness:
Those assuming this lens to be a small and compact device are wrong. The SIGMA 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM Art is fairly big and with about 700 grams it isn’t especially light, either. This, however, is due to its enormous light intensity as the lens consists of 13 elements and yet you – or at least I – won’t bother carrying a bit more weight.
Aperture, light intensity and image sharpness:
One of the greatest gifts the 35mm Art lens has is its enormous light intensity. The largest aperture is 1.4. With an open aperture you can shoot fantastic photos with creamy, soft bokeh where the subject itself will stand out in terms of brilliant sharpness thanks to this particular effect. This is the case because the aperture is constructed in an almost circular shape. The aspheric lens, which is first fixed right away, allows optimal lighting of the margins while at the same time it corrects distortions.
The image sharpness convinced me in every aperture range.
The smallest aperture is 16 whereas you can create a great focal plane, which makes the lens perfect for many fields in photography, such as photo stories or architecture photography.
Focus:
The focus of the lens is aimed at internal focusing. This means that with lenses of this kind in order to make the image sharp only one or several groups of elements are triggered in the interior of the lens. The advantages are that you can focus more quickly and with less noise. In my opinion the autofocus works extremely satisfying as it reacts quickly and reliably. The range of focusing distance with the SIGMA 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM is 30mm.
Fields of photography:
With the SIGMA 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM lens you can shoot almost everything – nature, landscape, sports, portrait and event photography works as well as it can serve as a perfect technical travel mate.
Equipment:
The lens is suitable for full-frame as well as for APSC Crop cameras. It can be connected to Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax and SIGMA devices.
Beyond that the SIGMA 35mm f/1.4 DG HSM has a threaded lens tube with a 67mm diameter to which you can fix several filters.
Conclusion:
Over the past few weeks I took several pictures under different lighting conditions – at daylight, in the sunshine, in diffuse light and at night, and I could fully rely on the performance of the lens in every situation. Its enormous sharpness and shooting with an open aperture in particular impressed me a lot.
