Of course, that wouldn't matter if the lens itself was no good. Fortunately, it's excellent. The optical path is a little different from the DSLR version, including 25 elements arranged in 15 groups, and it produces impressive sharpness throughout the entirety of the zoom range. There's some inevitable fall-off in the corners, but not enough to worry about, and it's the sort of thing that will be hidden anyway when you're shooting with a shallow depth of field. In this article, I’ll delve deep into how to use the Sigma 150-600mm Contemporary, which I’ve learned from my experiences. The addition of the 1.4x TC to the Sigma when stopped down, doesn’t seem to affect the image quality. The Sigma seems to have a clear advantage when it comes to chromatic aberration (CA), and even using the 1.4x TC there was noticeably less fringing in high contrast areas, when compared to the Tamron. Of course, CA is very easily corrected in Camera RAW or Lightroom when shooting in RAW. Hey Jim, Just curious… if you were buying a landscape/wildlife lens to take on an Alaskan Cruise, would you go with the Sigma 150-600, or the Canon 100-400 F4.5 – 5.6 II. I realize that the lenses are over a 1,000 dollars difference, but I want the best glass and most usable focal lengths. I will be using the Canon 7d mkII as the body, so the 1.6 crop would give me 160 to 640 on the Canon and a whopping 240 to 960 on the Sigma.. Is that approaching too long? Would the incremental stops of light be worth the difference?

Autofocus: All lenses in this comparison offer autofocus with built-in focus drive. Manual-focus override is by simply turning the dedicated focus ring. The focus ring on the Sigma 150-600 DN has the usual variable gearing of an original mirrorless design which allows for very precise manual focus when turned slowly but cannot be switched to linear gearing. Which makes smooth focus pulling for videographers almost impossible. The Sigma 150-600 HSM Sports and the Tamron 150-600 has the usual direct coupling and linear gearing of a lens designed for DSLRs and the Sony 200-600 also offers linear response for MF. [+]We didn't experience much "hunting", either in good or bad light, with the lens accurately focusing almost all of the time. It's also a very quiet performer, thanks to the built-in HSM (Hyper Sonic Motor), which makes this lens well-suited to video recording. Chromatic Aberrations

This Sigma 60-600mm is sharp, focuses well, covers a huge zoom range, focuses very close at most focal lengths and its stabilization allows easy hand-holding at all zoom settings, especially 600mm. Its tripod foot has an Arca-Swiss groove. Special thanks to John Lawson for his beautiful images! Sigma 150-600mm f/5-6.3 DG OS HSM Contemporary Overview

It focuses about as fast as Nikon's 200-500mm, but it's not instantaneous as are the Canon 100-400mm L IS II, Canon 70-300mm USM IS II and the Nikon 70-300 AF-P VR. I did a lot of testing, I even filmed in portrait mode and then I rode the image and verified that it was doing better than evidenced by the vertical OS DOESN´T WORK! To my mind, this is the weakest area of this lens. I simply didn’t find the vibration reduction system to work very well at all. It simply doesn’t seem to be the right match for the focal length. Vibration reduction is designed to counteract the slight shaking you get when shooting handheld. It might only be a small amount of shake, but at long focal lengths it’s amplified many times over. With an effective, modern vibration reduction system, you can often get an extra 2-3 stops before the shaking starts noticeably blurring the photos. In my experience, I wasn’t able to get anywhere near that–perhaps 1 stop at most.

If you go out of your way to turn correction off or are shooting on 35mm film, falloff is invisible at every setting except wide-open at 60mm and 600mm, where there is just a little bit that goes away as stopped down. Sigma’s service can change the mount of the lens between Sony’s E-mount and L-mount (at a cost). This is a unique feature that no other manufacturer offers. [++] Still, I am not in any way implying that the 150-600mm lenses are no good. In fact, this particular design produces surprisingly great images overall, with sharpness that one often cannot match when using shorter focal length lenses and teleconverters. The newer Nikkor 80-400mm VR for example, just does not couple well with teleconverters and there is a dramatic drop of AF reliability at the long end with the 1.4x TC, which not only maxes out at 560mm, but also slows the setup down to f/8. f/5-6.3: It has a very wide zoom range, from 150mm, which is almost at portrait length, all the way up to extreme telephoto length at 600mm. But the maximum aperture depends on where in the zoom spectrum you are. At 150mm the maximum aperture is f/5. At 600mm, the maximum aperture is 6.3mm. So it’s not the fastest lens out there, but it’s in good company with other super telephotos that aren’t priced in the stratosphere.

Impression

Tamron 150 600 G2 comes with a telezoom lens with fluorine coating and is fully weather-sealed. FAQs Q1. What aperture should you use for sports? Focal length is actually kind of complicated to figure out without some serious scientific measuring, but I do like to compare lenses of the same marketed focal length and see which one has more reach. HSM: Hyper Sonic Motor. This refers to the autofocus mechanism and trying to imply that it’s fast and quiet. Nikon’s version is called Silent Wave Motor.

Its optics are wonderful; sharp and contrasty all the time. Most people make mistakes like shooting with not enough light, shooting at slower shutter speeds with subject motion, shooting above ISO 100 or at smaller than f/11 which lead to softer images regardless of your equipment. For best results I shoot this lens always wide-open at ISO 100 if at all possible for the sharpest results. All of these tests are shot at f/6.3. The reason I'm showing the tests at f/6.3 is that it's the most common focal length you'd shoot this lens at.

Summary

This are real 3-D trees, so only the front fronds are actually in focus. The trunks are farther away and not in focus.