Sigma 24-70mm F2.8 DG DN Art Sony E Mount 578965

Product Information

For E-mount shooters, the nearest alternative might be the Sony FE 24–70mm F2.8 G Master II lens, which is more than double the price of the Sigma. However this newer lens brings much to the table, improving upon its predecessor in almost every way. The older 24–70mm F2.8 GM is still available, often at a discount, but it's never been a favorite of ours. Ok, now for my landscape, portrait and bokeh tests, and again all were taken on an Alpha 1 body with the default settings for Lens Compensation: so Shading and Chromatic Aberration correction set to Auto, but for this lens, Distortion Compensation set to off. Weighing in at 830 grams and measuring nearly 12.5cm in length, the Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN Art is certainly a big and heavy lens given its focal length, although it's actually slightly lighter and shorter than its main rival, the Sony FE 24-70mm F2.8 GM (886g and 13.6cms).

The previous Sony 24-70 also had great build quality but suffered from being front heavy. This is often problematic for gimbal users. Autofocus No, that is not what I mean. I know that the equivalent lens would be a 28-70/4.0, but I am refering to a standard zoom with f/2.0. It is "just" a little larger image circle. Moving into the corners shows the lens is roughly maintaining a good degree of detail, although with the aperture wide-open there’s a little softness in the extreme corner plus some darkening due to vignetting. As before, closing the aperture gradually improves the quality, brightening the corners and boosting the detail. If you’re a pixel-peeper with a high-res body, it’s definitely worth shooting detailed views at f5.6 or f8 rather than wide-open. From the side the Sigma 28-70 is pretty straightforward. A short angular throw on the zoom ring gets you from the wide to the long-end with the barrel extending by 23mm. There’s only one switch on the barrel which toggles between manual or autofocus, while at the end is a smooth motor-assisted focusing ring. There’s no optical stabilisation, so anti-shake has to be provided by your body.Like all of its nearest E-mount and L-mount rivals, Sigma's 24–70mm F2.8 eschews optical image stabilization in favor of in-body IS. It also opts for the same 82mm filter threads as used by all of its direct competition. A hydrophobic and oleophobic coating on the front lens element helps to resist rain drops and accidental smudges.

Also, it is no secret that Sony colors were poor. Yes A77 NEX 7, A7R II had bad colors. When people say Sony has good colors the speak about gen 3 A7 cameras and up. It’s FF. It has never been cheap. Look at the lens releases of all the higher end glass for FF they were never cheap.The final two images here were both taken at 70mm, looking at the absolute far upper-right edge of the frame. Here are the results at f/2.8:

The Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN Art for for Sony E-Mount and L-Mount is a new fast standard zoom lens for full-frame Sony, Leica, Panasonic and Sigma cameras. It's not 100% fine, when you have extreme vignetting. It makes corners much more visibly noisy than the center of the image, even at base ISO, and it makes corners completely un-usable at high ISOs. Also, the extreme distortion corrections make the corners very un-sharp, sometimes. In short, a SMALL amount of built-in correction is awesome, such as that with the Sigma 14-24 2.8 DN FE; but any more than that, and the lens becomes nearly un-usable for certain things, namely astro-landscape photography.Here is the angle of view that the new Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN Art covers with its 2.9x zoom (with distortion compensation): But when shooting wide-open with the Sigma 24–70mm, the shape of the cat's eye effect is rather unusual and quite different to that we've seen in other lenses. There's a quite noticeable shift in angle as if the shaded side of the bokeh has been further flattened, and it makes the bokeh even more distracting than it would be in a lens exhibiting regular cat's eye. The Sigma 24-70mm f2.8 DG DN Art is a general-purpose zoom maintaining a bright and constant f2.8 focal ratio across the range. It is designed for full-frame mirrorless cameras and available in the native Sony E and Leica L mounts, the latter working on Leica, Panasonic and Sigma L-mount bodies. Announced in November 2019, it’s the third Art lens designed for full-frame mirrorless cameras, following the Sigma 35mm f1.2 DG DN Art and the Sigma 14-24mm f2.8 DG DN Art. Now for focusing on the Sony A1 using a central area and single AFS mode at 70mm f2.8 and you can see there’s a minor contrast-based wobble at each focus-pull to confirm, but the process is still fairly swift and quiet too. Switching the A1 to Continuous AF mode though forces the body to use phase-detect AF alone which here is refocusing noticeably faster than before, and in my tests didn’t reduce accuracy. So it can be worth experimenting to find the best mode.